My nephew seems to have inherited the same dodgy wrists that I did. He has been suffering for a long time, like I did, and wearing braces, like I did. But the surgery is non-invasive and outpatient, and it solves the problem for good. I know whereof I speak, having had the procedure done on both wrists. But he is resistant to the idea.
“Once they cut you open…” my nephew said, with conviction.
I groaned inwardly, because I knew exactly where he had gotten that from. My grandmother was the queen of trail-off sentences. They’re very deceptive. They make it sound like the end of that sentence is so dire and significant that you hesitate to even utter it. It took me quite a while to figure out that what it really means, more often than not, is that you don’t know what you’re talking about, but want people to agree with you anyway.
But of all the trail-off sentences in my grandmother’s lexicon, “Once they cut you open…” was her favorite. She was terrified of surgery. It didn’t matter how minimally invasive the procedure might have been. In fact, she was terrified of all things medical.
The irony is that my grandmother died long before my nephew was born. He got that quote because it had turned into a family story over the years. Some of us thought it was a story about a silly, misguided old woman. Others, apparently, still took it as a tale of caution. That second group probably did not know the end of the story.
So I said to my nephew, “You do realize that your great-grandmother was born in the 1800’s, right? When she was a child, doctors were still using leeches. They hadn’t even figured out that there were different blood types yet. Her fear of simple, routine surgery was what wound up killing her.
“She had the epicanthic eye folds that are relatively common in Scandinavia. (I have them, too.) Hers were particularly heavy, and got so heavy as she aged that they disrupted her vision. There is a simple surgery for that, but she refused to get it.
“One day, she went out to lunch with her daughter. She needed to use the restroom, and asked a waiter where it was. He pointed down a hallway, and indicated it was on the right. She went down the hallway, and opened a door on the right. Since she couldn’t see well, she didn’t see that it wasn’t labeled “restroom”. It was labeled “employees only”. She opened the door, stepped in, fell down a flight of stairs and died. That wouldn’t have happened if she had just gotten the damned surgery. So ‘Once they cut you open…’, my dear nephew, is a lousy excuse.”
Now, did this convince my nephew to stop suffering and get the surgery? Not as of this writing. He’s still wearing the braces, as far as I know. He’s an adult and gets to make his own choices. That, and to use my own trail-off sentence, “You can lead a horse to water…”
Here’s the thing. (Yes, there’s always a thing.) We form our opinions (and make our choices due to those opinions) based on the information that we have at the time. Sometimes that information is completely accurate, but then new or additional information comes along. Sometimes, we have formed our opinions based on information that was always bogus, and we only learn the truth later.
If either of the above scenarios turn out to be true, there’s absolutely no shame in changing your opinions and choices. In fact, it’s only logical that you should do so. There’s no point in looking back at past decisions and feeling embarrassed by them. There’s nothing you can do about that now. But you can make a course adjustment in your life. You can do the right thing, or the healthier thing, or the thing that modern science has proven is more beneficial to you and the people around you. (You can also apologize or make amends if such things are needed)
I, too, would have been surgery-averse if I lived in the 1800’s. As this article attests, some of the practices back then were horrific. Even if many of them were going out of style by the time my grandmother came along, I’m sure she heard terrifying stories from her parents and grandparents, and that would have made an impression. Back then, 20-60% of people died during surgery, depending upon the procedure. Now it’s less than 2% across all procedures, so a minimally invasive procedure would carry a much, much lower risk than that. There has been a lot of progress in medicine in the last 125 years, and we should take that into account before arriving at any medical conclusions.
If any decision is particularly impactful, for example, if it will make a difference to your loved ones, your community, your country, or the world, it’s even more important to gather as much information as you can before making your decisions. Still, you can only act (or not act) based on the information that is available at the time. There’s no shame in that.
In the early days, many people thought Hitler, Mussolini, and Pol Pot were great, I’m sure. But as more information became available, a startling number of those people radically changed their opinions, as well they should have. It’s not that they “came to their senses”, which implies they were out of their heads at first, but now were normal. No. They had been misled. They were given false information and chose to follow these monsters because of that. Changing their minds wasn’t about coming to their senses. It was about discovering and then not letting their pride get in the way of the truth.
I seriously doubt that if you walked up to anyone in a neutral atmosphere and said, “Here’s a picture of a person you’ve never seen before. He will eventually be responsible for the death of tens of millions of people due to famine, political persecution, prison labor, and executions. With no other information about this person, would you think he was a good guy or a bad guy?” I’m thinking that most people would say that person was a bad guy.
Well, that person was Mao Zedong, and a lot of people are still misled about him and his philosophy to this very day. Others are too embarrassed or afraid to change their opinions about him at this late stage. The conflicts between the two opposing points of view regarding Maoism in its current evolution are still causing torture and death to this very day.
I guess the point I’m trying to make is, don’t let pride, shame, or basic bloody-mindedness get in the way of changing your mind about something when you receive new information about it (or him). That goes for surgery, politicians, vaccinations, environmentalism, your partner in life or in business, Q-Anon, a religious leader, or your stance on bigfoot. It’s okay to change your mind. We are all learning. We are all works in progress.
I was inspired to write this post because Dear Husband and I were just making my lazy guacamole for lunch. If given the choice, I will always let someone else do the chopping, because no matter how careful I try to be, I will cut myself. It is all but guaranteed.
I looked over and he was cutting the avocadoes… on a wooden cutting board. I had to wrestle down a visceral reaction. I was always taught that wooden cutting boards were unsanitary, and that they should never be used. Because of this, I always used plastic or marble ones. When Dear Husband told me that he was going to switch out all our cutting boards for wooden ones, I strongly protested.
Lucky for me, he stood his ground. Of course, I immediately went to the internet to prove him wrong. And I discovered that I was the one who was wrong. (There are a million articles out there. Here’s one.)
There is, indeed, new information out there. It seems that plastic boards allow bacteria to linger and even grow, whereas solid (not glued or laminated) wooden boards pull the bacteria into the grain almost immediately, trap it, and it dies off. In addition, plastic cutting boards allow microplastics to enter your food.
Of course, you must sanitize your board properly as the above article describes, but yes, wooden cutting boards are much safer. (Unless you’re me, and cut yourself all the time. For me, there’s no cutting board on earth that is safe.)
So with this new information, I had to humbly tell Dear Husband that he was right. (It sometimes happens). We got the wooden cutting boards.
I still have a visceral reaction every time we use them, and probably always will. My mother made her cutting board decisions based on different information, and she drummed it into my head, and it’s still lodged in there somewhere. But yeah, wooden cutting boards in my home from now on.
Unless new information comes along, of course.
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