March 6, 2019
Well, we had a nice run,
my old right hip and me.
Seventy laps around the sun,
and so many ecstatic miles
of endorphin-spun joy
I couldn’t count the cost.
But I would have been cat food
forty thousand years ago,
perhaps a snack for a saber tooth.
Hobbled by a bum hip,
I could not have caught a ground sloth
or scored an egg from an angry auk.
You might have found my tangled heap
of dried blood and gnawed bones
mixed with gristle and scat.
But forty thousand years on,
we live in technological times.
So I rise from blood and bone saw
hammered and reamed, teetering
on a new titanium hip
which once was ore from the Outback
reduced in a fluidized bed,
superheated to a thousand degrees
in a stainless steel retort.
Leached, jackhammered,
crushed and pressed,
then melted with a plasma arc
and alloyed with aluminum
so its Young’s modulus matches
my bone – behold
my bone – behold
the forty thousand dollar man,
incipient cyborg, titanium hipster.
By the mercy of insurance,
craft of the surgeon,
and sweat at the hands of a therapist,
soon I shall stride again.
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| Credits: Thigh bone by the author. X-ray by Athens Orthopedic Clinic. Doodle by David Noah. |
