My impending surgery was a week away and until then I had managed to keep it out of my mind. But by the time the woman from Pitch Slapped was soaking up our adoration, it was all I could think about. I began realizing that my only prior experience with surgeons were those on television, and suddenly I wondered: Is my surgeon more like the dubious Dr. Lucas Jones from General Hospital or the eccentric but brilliant Greg House from House?

And the fact that I didn’t know the answer nearly sent me into a panic.

Some five months earlier I began experiencing a nagging pain in my lower abdomen, a discomfort that radiated into my groin. To investigate the issue, I repeatedly exposed myself to a myriad of doctors and allowed them to poke and prod my genitals while dryly asking me to cough. The consensus answer, more or less, was what the first doctor told me: “I think you have a small hernia and will need an operation to fix it.”

During the preceding winter, I had joined a coed over-35 indoor soccer league. There is little else to do in a snowless Alaskan winter, which this one was, particularly if bitter cold weather offends your sensibilities. As I am prone to do, I took the soccer league as a serious personal challenge, a chance to rekindle any athletic prowess I might possess. When my competitive nature fully kicked in, I found myself holding individual practice sessions and secretly scouting my opponents.

As a teenager in Kentucky, I sensed I might not have the genetic material to be a top athlete, but I was coordinated and told myself I would work harder than anyone else. Often I looked at the people around me and wondered who among us would go on to greatness. It was fairly easy to see which ones would end up in jail or topping out at a department store cash register, but I figured at least one of us would go on to be great at something, maybe even become famous. At the time, it seemed to me that talent was a benevolent fairy, drifting around sprinkling its dust upon the lucky ones and floating right over others. Those of us who hadn’t been selected had to work for it which, for me, often led to some unorthodox training methods. “Remember in high school when Brad used to run through the yard with the hose wrapped around him?” My older sister Madeline would often say, a memory that invariably triggered hysterical laughter.

“It’s called resistance training,” I would protest. “Today’s athletes may have better equipment, such as weight belts or even parachutes, but I’d like to think of myself as an innovator.”

Through her sobs and tears and fits of laughter, Madeline would paint a more candid portrait. “I, I, I just remember looking out the window, and, and, and saying ‘Mom? Why is Brad running around the yard with the garden hose around his waist?’”

I recalled my resistance training sessions each Sunday when we lined up for over-35 soccer games. It wasn’t a garden hose I was dragging now, but a few extra pounds and a couple of extra decades. I could tell that most of us, in our own way, were pretending these six-on-six matches were part of something much larger. Perhaps an imaginary scholarship was on the line, a fake World Cup trophy, the respect of billions of fictitious adoring fans watching from around the globe, a slice of pizza, anything really. All that mattered was winning and proving yourself better than the 42-year old balding accountant standing in your way.

Our team generally arrived well before game time to go through warmups, choose our tactics and select the starting lineup. When the whistle blew, plans were immediately abandoned in favor of chaotic running, shouting and, eventually, kicking. Our team’s self-appointed best player often prowled around the field angrily barking orders to us and shoving over opposing players. “C’mon! Terrible!” he might say to the girl on our team who was invited by a co-worker to try soccer for the first time. “Don’t pass it to Julie, that’s a dead end,” he might remark to one of his more favored teammates. By the end of the game, both teams were usually angry and the score lopsided. 

The adult soccer league wasn’t the first time I had used athletics to counter the process of aging. In fact, it seemed to be my default plan. By my thirties there was one obsession after another: Tennis, hiking, snowboarding, an Alaskan form of torture called mountain running, cross country skiing, long distance running, mountain biking and of course soccer. Each one came with its own side order of injuries. Severely sprained ankles, a broken wrist, a damaged knee ligament, multiple torn calf muscles, a concussion, a black eye, scores of bruises, and even a mysterious bicep strain that seemed to occur while simply sitting on a couch.

And now this latest development, a hernia and a date with a surgeon.

I had never before been operated on and now I could scarcely bring myself to say the words hernia surgery aloud. It sounded too much like an old person’s problem. I imagined walking the halls of a retirement home, and seeing a saggy old man with a walker shuffling out into his doorway, shaking his finger at no one in particular and saying, “Now they tell me I have a hernia! And I need surgery!” Through the doorway I would see an old birthday sign, half falling down and reading Happy 90^th Grandpa.

Nearly a year earlier, my father had hernia surgery at 68-years-old and the only thing I recalled about his telling of the story was the bit about the insertion of a post-operative catheter.

“Oh. My. God.” He said. “The surgery wasn’t bad, but afterwards they had to put a catheter in. Oh. My. God. The pain was un-be-lievable.”

The thought of someone coldly inserting a tube into my penis and threading it through to my bladder nearly triggered my gag reflex.   

“It’s just crazy,” I said to Victoria one day. “They fill you up with drugs, wheel you into this room naked, a team of people shove you full of tubes and then they cut you open and start rooting around in there? Why are people not up in arms about all of this? How is this even legal?””

“Brad, stop, they do it every day. It will be fine!” She said.

“I know, and they do it every day!”