Did My Hip Save Us From Tragedy?

This is About One Specific Body Suffering From Joint Pain. It Happens to Hurt While Two Groups of People Suffer Joint Pain Too.

I’m scheduled for total hip replacement surgery tomorrow, my third major operation in less than four years. The medical team insists this one is going to be easy, especially compared to my pandemic brain surgery back in May of 2020. I suppose they’re right.

The problem is that I’m reluctant to part with my right hip. Despite the pain it’s generating both locally and throughout my body, I’ve come to believe this hip has superpowers. And who wants to give up a magical body part?

I did not experience any such hesitation before my other surgeries, and though I’m also fond of my brain, I wasn’t trading it for an artificial one. In that instance, I was getting rid of an uninvited tumor.

While I wouldn’t recommend brain surgery for anyone lacking chutzpah, I can see how even the cowardly lion himself might throw his furry ass upon the operating table while whimpering, “I haven’t any courage at all. I even scare myself. Take the tumor out now!”

There’s something inherently frightening about a tumor about to invade both your superior sagittal sinus (the brain’s major vein) while also pressing into your left parietal lobe (an area of prime cognitive real estate as far as brain matter goes). To keep it in there, an enemy with the ability to keep growing, seemed the more terrifying option than having my head cut open.

But let’s return to the cowardly lion. Can you see him as I do? Under the bright lights of the surgical theatre?

And since one cannot undergo safe surgery with a tail flopping overhead, I see the Tinman pinning it down beneath a rusted extremity. Having no heart but the most empathy, the Tinman would cry while performing this necessary task, causing more rust of his arm, which would be a good thing. Only a heavy immobile arm could hold that lion in place for major surgery.

As for the scarecrow, he’d be scratching his head with envy, thinking he’d rather have a tumor-stricken brain than no brain at all, and his scratching would send clumps of straw swirling around. Dorothy would be tasked with all the emotional labor, including getting Scarecrow out of there. Surgery requires a sterile environment, not one contaminated by crunchy dried grain.

Unlike my imagined Cowardly Lion, I didn’t enjoy the presence of family or friends during my hospital stay because of Covid protocols, but to be honest, I didn’t mind. I figured staff would be free from dealing with my worried people in their midst. Probably, I’d be better off. Safer. I swear, I had zero separation anxiety while going in.

I did, however, suffer from one extreme form of preoperative separation anxiety. I feared the inevitable separation from the part of my skull that would be removed and left to float inside a container of antibiotic fluid for the duration of my surgery. This chiseled out section is medically termed the “skull piece.” I worried about my skull piece a lot, probably even more than I worried about my actual brain.

What if a surgical tech accidentally disposed of my skull piece? What if the antibiotic fluid spilled out and left my skull contaminated with infectious disease? I worried that once we got split apart, we would never reunite. And then, what would cover my brain? A large sheet of metal? That’s when I started to identify with the Tinman. And if I lost brain function altogether, I’d end up like the Scarecrow.

I see now how my fixation on The Wizard of Oz played a role in preparation for my craniotomy. I used it as a comedic container into which I projected my fear. This afforded me a sense of control. Like only a true wizard could do, I manipulated those characters to entertain me so that I’d avoid the very real terror of having my brain cut open.

Why then, is my upcoming hip surgery filling me with far more anxiety?

To understand this requires the reader to stop grinning. This is where I drop the comedy and reach deep into all my Holy Chutzpah. Because there is another Oz in this story, and it’s located in southern Israel.

According to The Times of Israel, almost 25% of the population of Kibbutz Nir Oz were killed or kidnapped during the October 7^th massacre by Hamas terrorists. The surviving residents remain unable to return home at the time of this writing. The Bibas family, whose red-haired images have filled my newsfeeds since that horrific day, were kidnapped from this kibbutz, and their current status remains unknown.

What does any of this have to do with me or my upcoming hip surgery?

I believe my hip potentially saved me and my family from that massacre. We’d been planning to stay in Israel for the month of October. We’d hoped to arrive in late September, stay for all of October, and then travel to Egypt and Jordan afterward. We were going to homeschool our child there. I wanted to stay in a kibbutz. 

My husband is Israeli. He moved to the United States at age ten, but everyone in his extended family beyond his parents and siblings still live there.

According to my plan, we would situate ourselves somewhere in the kibbutzim. Perhaps one stay in the south and another in the north, in order to visit with the family members residing in both areas.

My husband, on the other hand, insists that had we gone, we’d have stayed in Tel Aviv, as that is where he’s always stayed, and so have I, though his trips outnumber mine by the hundreds to the handful. I think we would have stayed in Tel Aviv for part of the time, but I’d been fantasizing about our child running outdoors, meeting other kids, enjoying the kind of freedom American children no longer experience as I did while growing up in the 70s and 80s.

Since I have a lot of Holy Chutzpah, you can imagine that my personality is not the most subservient. I think we would’ve ended up in a kibbutz. The whole point was to give our child an integrative experience surrounded by relatives and other Israelis.

Sometime in June of 2023, my husband was looking to book flights, but I told him, “Honey, I can’t go.”

My hip pain had become intolerable. I suffered a deep throbbing ache and sudden shooting pains. I still can’t sleep. I need to physically lift the leg with my arms at times, such as when I’m getting in the car. Climbing stairs is an Olympian challenge.

My husband empathized. The timing was no good.

Months passed, and then four days prior to the massacre, my husband announced he needed to jump on a flight to Israel. Business issues. He planned to leave on Thursday and return on Sunday. I told him no. That I needed him here to massage away my pain. He actually listened and stayed home.

If he had gone to Israel for business, he would’ve been in Tel Aviv, safely removed from the massacre. I still would’ve lost my mind with panic.

But it’s the canceled family trip that makes me reluctant to part with my hip. I feel gratitude for the pain it’s given me. And though I don’t want to suffer anymore, I’m feeling some preoperative loss. I don’t really want to say goodbye to the joint that may have saved our lives, or at least a harrowing trip over there. I want to bring it back home. I’d take good care of it, but I doubt the hospital allows surgical souvenirs.

We are fortunate that we won’t ever know what might’ve been. I call this our devastating relief.

But this is no stand-alone relief. The realization of so much evil—murder and rape and kidnapping—it will never leave my body. And now, an ongoing war costing lives of Gazans and Israeli soldiers. It is all too much, so just a few minutes ago, I turned toward Oz again. I sought relief. What does the word mean? I didn’t know.  

Google informed me that in Hebrew, “Oz” means strength and courage. This made me smile. It goes along with having Holy Chutzpah. But then I wondered—why did the author of The Wizard of Oz use this name? Did he speak Hebrew? Was he even Jewish?

I did another Google search, but never got past the author’s name. L. Frank Baum. Immediately, I recognized the same last name of my rabbi. The one preparing me for conversion.  

I’ve never been a mystical sort of person, but one of my dearest friends and fellow writer, Karen, believes in the power of synchronicities. Karen, if you are reading this, I then looked up the meaning of the name “Baum,” and it means tree. I know your mouth just dropped open.

I’m sorry there’s not time to share the significance of the “tree” with everyone else right now, but let’s just say I’m going to transfer all that magical thinking I’ve been projecting toward my hip elsewhere now.

In case any reader is wondering about our family in Israel, we are fortunate that we did not lose anyone. One family member survived the massacre at several points (the music festival, and then the kibbutz she fled to, and then almost being taken into Gaza). I’m sorry to share that her boyfriend was murdered by the terrorists, as were many friends and loved ones of our friends and loved ones.

We wait for the safe return of the hostages and wish for the psychological and physical healing of the survivors and the bereaved. We hope for a resolution to the war so that all Gazans and Israelis may enjoy peaceful coexistence.

Also, I am faithful that another lion, the Israeli symbol of strength and bravery—the lion of Judah—is also engaged in surgery. This lion does not lie upon a table but works to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza. This lion strives for a surgical operation in terms of eliminating Hamas and locating the hostages. I hope the world stops demonizing Israel and realizes that radical Islamic terrorist groups are the true enemy of both Gazans and Israelis.

I say it all the time, so I will say it again here: Empathy is not a one-sided affair. To withhold love and hope from any set of persons harms all of humanity.

As I prepare for tomorrow’s operation, which will hopefully provide balance to my individual physical body, I’m making similar wishes for the world at large.

May everyone receive the gift of greater balance. Only then, I suspect, will peace be possible.

I’ll be back as soon as I’m healed enough to write again.

Thank you for reading and goodnight!