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“You’ve ripped your patellar tendon right off the patella.” He pushed down on my extended leg as hard as he could. “It’s extraordinary. The fact that you’re able to straighten your leg at all goes against all the laws of physics.”

 

My chest swelled. I couldn’t wait to tell my wife about this new superpower. “So what do we do?” I asked.

 

“Surgery. We have to repair this ASAP. Whatever fibers of the tendon are still intact will fray and shred at any time.”

 

Outpatient surgery under general anesthesia, then two weeks with a straight-leg brace, followed by physical therapy. Great. There goes my vacation.

 

On rethinking it, I realized that my wife was not going to be happy. My injury had been preventable. I hadn’t been sufficiently cautious. But she didn’t have time for my tale. She had a story of her own, and mine paled by comparison. She had just received a message from her neurosurgeon’s office to schedule her annual post brain surgery MRI. And by the way, said the message, don’t forget to arrange for your plastic surgery consult.

 

“The nose?” I said, looking at her with a critical eye. “The neck? Or perhaps it’s the lips. Plump them up a little?”

 

“If you think I’m going to make your morning oatmeal after your surgery,” she said, “think again.” She threw her empty coffee cup at me. It bounced off the crystal decanter on the shelf and shattered the china cat I’ve hated for a quarter-century. “Why is he suggesting it now, 8 years later?” she wondered. “He never mentioned that I might need plastic surgery.”

 

We sat at the table drinking coffee, wondering whether there was something in the water. We’d just returned from an extended stay in California. Maybe, we thought, we should cancel all medical appointments and sneak back to the West Coast, where we had managed to avoid doctors for seven months. In the middle of it all, my phone rang.

 

“Funniest thing,” said my doctor. “I was having lunch and thinking there was something wrong. I’ve never seen someone with a ripped patellar tendon present the way you did. So I went back to the MRI to examine it again, and there were different pictures on the screen. The torn patellar tendon is someone else’s problem. Yours is fine.”

 

“Who’s the other person?” I asked, ashamed of my Schadenfreude. That’s a fancy German word for being secretly grateful that someone else—not you—got zinged.

 

He had no idea, but an inquiry was in progress. As we talked about what really was wrong with my knee, and how to mend my relatively minor knee issue, my wife’s phone rang. I watched her listen to whomever was on the other end.

 

“So, I don’t need the brain MRI?” she said.

 

I had my doctor on speaker, and he overheard the conversation. “Why would you need a brain MRI?” he asked me.

 

“And the plastic surgery?” my wife asked.

 

“This isn’t like you,” said my doctor of over twenty years. He sounded concerned. “Why are you insisting on having a medical procedure? There’s nothing wrong with you that a cortisone injection won’t cure.” He thought for a moment. “I suppose a little plastic surgery to reduce the nose, and get rid of some of the neck wrinkles, and you’ll be right as rain.”

 

He’d heard enough. I took him off speaker. Damned if I was going to explain why I needed plastic surgery to a guy who’d just put me through unnecessary patellar tendon surgery and ruined my vacation.

 

“How could such an error happen?” asked my wife. Turned out her doctor had two charts up on the screen at the same time and looked at the wrong one.

 

No damage done. We’ve made appointments for concurrent plastic surgery, her nose, and my neck. Next year, after the coronavirus vaccine is out, we’ll do her neck and my nose. She’ll watch mine and then I’ll watch hers. In this error-prone environment, you can’t be too careful.