[The 3:40 version of the above clip, here]
Notes from my recent back operation at Hong Kong's Canossa Caritas hospital, 1 Stubbs Road. Where happens our son was born in August 1997, just after HK's handover to China.
Mise en scene: me, on one of those mobile trolley bed things they have in hospitals, to move the patient around. Dressed in operating gowns. Slightly dosed with relaxing drugs, I'm feeling pretty chill as we head to the Operation Theatre.
I'm feeling chill because I trust them. All the staff, the nurses, the doctors, the support staff, I trust them all. They are all super friendly, super supportive, super kind, super "give confidence" type people. I know that they have all been trained to the top international levels. I know all the equipment is the latest, world class stuff.
So, here goes. [It's kind of AI-assisted slop, but if I don't post it now, I never will. It's been sitting in my pending tray since the op last December]
The fluorescent lights of the operating theatre in Hong Kong’s Canossa hospital hummed like a lazy orchestra as the pre-op sedation wrapped my nerves in warm cotton wool. I lay on the narrow table, leads stuck to my chest, watching the monitors blink and beep. One small machine kept up a steady, almost cheeky *ping* every few seconds.
“Ah,” I slurred “I see you have… the machine that goes ping.”
A polite silence. Then a ripple of courteous, slightly puzzled smiles crinkled the eyes above the masks. No belly laughs, no “Brilliant, Monty Python!” Just the gentle, professional equivalent of “Very good, sir, now count backwards from ten.” Dr. Penelope Shum leaned in, her almond eyes sparkling with wry amusement.
“Call me Penny,” she had told me earlier in the holding bay, voice calm as still water. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”
She adjusted the IV. “Relaxed already. Good.” The surgeon gave a small nod. The propofol slid in like velvet darkness, and the theatre faded.
Hours later I floated back to the surface in recovery, my back a distant, polite ache beneath fresh dressings. Pethidine hummed through the line—pure liquid bliss, the kind that makes the world feel gift-wrapped. Penny was still there, chart in hand, flanked by masked doctors and nurses whose dark eyes watched me with gentle curiosity. A Westerner on their table, now murmuring through the haze.
“How are you feeling?” one nurse asked. “Pain? Nausea? Anything you need?”
I smiled the lazy smile of the truly medicated. “Just… some more drugs, please.”
Soft laughter among the blue scrubs. Even through masks, the warmth was unmistakable.
Then, unbidden, the old Tang lines rose like moonlight on water. In my opioid stupor I began reciting, in Classical Chinese:
床前明月光, 疑是地上霜
舉頭望明月, 低頭思故鄉。
Jǔ tóu wàng míng yuè, Dī tóu sī gù xiāng.
The moon shines bright before my bed, I think it is frost upon the ground.
I raise my head to see the moon, Then lower it, thinking of home.
The masked faces froze. A Westerner, high on pethidine, quoting Li Bai? Penny’s eyes widened. “You know Tang poetry?”
“Studied it years ago" I said. In Beijing.
She reached over and adjusted the drip. “Python in theatre,” she said, “Li Bai in recovery. Quite the patient. Rest now.”
As the bliss pulled me under again, her steady gaze was the last clear thing—competent, kind, a quiet bridge across cultures sealed in shared vulnerability, unexpected verse, and the soft, faithful *ping* of machines that, this time, really did go ping.
The operation itself had been a marvel of modern mercy. An MRI months earlier had shown the culprit: sneaky bone overgrowth—osteophytes and thickened facets—slowly strangling the nerves in my lumbar spine. Walking had become a painful shuffle; left unchecked, it would have parked me in a wheelchair for good.
But instead of the old-school ordeal, the surgeon had slipped in through two tiny incisions, guided by a camera smaller than half a chopstick. Minimal muscle damage, targeted bone removal, nerves freed like untangling a garden hose. I was up the next day, hobbling but free.
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ADDED: For anyone currently staring down spinal stenosis, or just curious why I keep thanking modern medicine like a deranged convert:
Twenty or thirty years ago this would have been a completely different horror movie. Think open laminectomy—the surgical equivalent of taking a crowbar to a stubborn sardine can. A foot-long incision straight down the back, muscles stripped off the bone like wallpaper from a damp wall, the entire lamina (the bony “roof” over the spinal canal) sawn away, ligaments hacked out, everything wide open to the fluorescent lights.
Blood loss, drains, a scar that looked like you’d lost a duel with a zipper factory, and weeks of lying there feeling as if a tram had reversed over you. Recovery? Months. Risk of the back turning wobbly like cheap IKEA furniture (they call it iatrogenic instability when the surgeon accidentally makes your spine even more exciting than it already was). Many patients traded leg pain for permanent back pain and a lifelong limp.
Today? Ninja surgery. Tiny keyholes, endoscopic camera playing peek-a-boo, muscles gently parted rather than ripped, only the offending bone removed. I walked out of hospital feeling like I’d had a really thorough massage instead of major spinal work. The difference is night and day—like upgrading from a horse-drawn cart to a silent Tesla for your central nervous system.
So yes, I recited Li Bai while floating on pethidine, but the real poetry was the operation itself. And the best line of all? Penny’s calm promise, delivered with those beautiful almond eyes: “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”
She did. Perfectly.
