Quit trying to kill me, surgeons

1. Go to Med School

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/health/20surgery.html?ref=health
When you undergo surgery, you are permitting a stranger armed with glorified Williams-Sonoma-ware to mess around with your internal setup, either because that setup is malfunctioning in a way that might cause you to die, or because it does not look similar to that of Tom Brady's fiances, past and present. Either of these legitimate concerns may necessitate what, given other circumstances, might sound horrifying, namely, chopping you up a bit.

Fortunately, surgeons have recently come up with a groundbreaking new way of reducing fatalities on the operating table so that everyone has a better chance of combating lethal brain cancer/banging overexposed football playerz. It's called "The Checklist", and it consists of: someone writing down all the important stuff the surgeon should definitely not forget to do! This is method is so effective that a year after introducing a 19-item checklist, fatalities in 8 hospitals were down 40%!

All of this is thanks to one visionary man, Dr. Atul A. Gawande, who challenged the status quo with his suggestion that maybe doctors should spend as much time preparing for surgery as suburban moms spend preparing for a supermarket run. He says it is quote "hard to identify which items on the checklist had proved the most important," and it's easy to see why that might be a problem. From asking if the equipment has been sterilized, to finding out if there's any extra blood lying around (just in case!), everything on the list seems pretty important. Don't forget to figure out which organ you are sposd to remove, and check if a new one is here yet!

Seeing as The Grocery List approach has yet to be implemented in most American hospitals, I will be avoiding surgeons at all costs until someone in the government looks up from Wall Street Armageddon long enough to pass any legislature not related to the un-fucking of our national finances. (You know why the word unfucked doesn't exist? Because it is completely, utterly and totally impossible. But anyway.) In the meantime, I will just have to deal with my current un-Gisellean look, and take comfort in the fact that someday soon, Dr. Gwande will devote another of his Obvious Fact Confirmation studies to the widely-held theory that Tom Brady, football hero, is a giant douche.