By the time you read this today, I will either be in surgery or just out of surgery – or, if you get to it late, I may well be back home and resting in bed. Thanks to the wonders of technology, I am able to write this post as well as the posts for the rest of the week ahead of time. We do live in truly wondrous times. This will be my fourth significant surgery, and the second on my back. It probably won’t be my last. Many of us have a negative reaction to the idea of having surgery, and I am not exempt from that. When I consider, however, that if I had been born one hundred years earlier I would have been confined to a wheel chair long ago and experiencing intractable pain, I am very thankful for the gift of modern medicine. Even with all of its imperfections and room for improvement, it’s much better than nothing!