What a surgeon does to a patient, if it were done without consent, would be illegal
— Catherine Mohr
Once upon a time I consented to an assault.
A guy I didn’t really know intentionally sprained my knee, cut it open and inserted a tiny camera and scalpel which he used to remove a torn section of meniscus. He had decided that this was necessary based on a detailed photo of my knee that was taken by a giant magnet a few months prior. He took some more photos of the inside of the knee while he was poking around in there (see below).
What’s more, so that I didn’t fight back, shortly before he started his colleague injected me with a concoction that knocked me out, so I was asleep the whole time. I was the perfect victim. Annoyingly, I didn’t even get to the “counting backwards from 10” bit.
Afterwards they gave me some pills that reduced the swelling and numbed the pain, wrapped it up and a few hours later sent me on my way.
I limped away delighted. All in the name of … healing.
It was a good reminder that not all progress is a straight line progression. But also that we live in amazing times, when these sort of technologies and procedures are not only available but absolute routine and mostly unremarkable.
It’s not very long ago that the solution to this sort of situation would have been a couple of concrete pills and instructions to quietly get on with it. We don’t know how lucky we are eh!
