COLUMN: Thinking about the end
Though it is a truism that we know that every breath could be our last; we could be instantly struck down by a meteor or a misguided act of Congress, there are only a couple times when I take the threat seriously. Those two times are takeoff and pre-op.
Most of the airline disasters that come to mind have taken place right after takeoff. Don’t let that seat-as-flotation-device stuff fool you. You are not safe. You do not have a parachute and the chances of you landing in water on a trip from Salt Lake to St. Louis are about the same as a damaged 747 gliding to a safe landing like a seagull in a landfill. The biggest threat is when the thing is full of fuel, luggage, peanuts and passengers and you are crisscrossing the flight patterns of sleepy pilots and disgruntled flight controllers.
The hospital is the worst since you are sitting there in this silly looking gown that only ties up the back. If I could tie it up the back I wouldn’t have been in for the surgery, but that’s another story. You have to wear this funky hair net and slippers with all sorts of tubes going into you.
Like take off, pre-op it is also eerie knowing that you are going to be put under anesthesia and wake up several hours later in a completely different place after assorted medical personnel have had their way with you. Or worse yet, wake up in a persistent vegetative state. Or even more worse than that a persistent vegetative state on CNN with all manner of grandstanding pundits punditing on what your wishes are. At least if I went out on the aforementioned plane crash there wouldn’t be much of me left to appear on the news. But then again if I were is a persistent vegetative state I could still have a career ahead of me as a dean or department head.
“No, no he’s not is a persistent vegetative state, he’s just very contemplative.”
It’s a choice I hope I don’t have to make.
So whether you are sitting in the pre-op waiting room or the aisle seat of a 747, what do you want to go out doing? Do want to spend your last moments of life reading People Magazine, the New Yorker or maybe a book? A book, though classier, is problematic. You can get through a People Magazine article in five minutes, but if you take a book, you be stuck leaving these earthly confines the middle of the plot.
The last meal is also a little problematic since there aren’t many choices on the plane and when you go into surgery you are ordered to stop eating before midnight the night before. And well, the last meal thing is more about capital punishment than catastrophic accidental death.
If you went through this end-of-times checklist every waking moment it could drive you crazy. I just let it drive me crazy a few times a year – my last meal, the last person I talk to, my last e-mail, what will people find on my hard drive …
Dennis Hinkamp was in pre-op last week and is flying this week so he’s feeling a little more morbid than usual. Comments can be sent to dennish@ext.usu.edu.