The doctor noted he'd make an appointment with a surgeon for me, but I'll check with the guy I used down at Stanford as well. How many of these things have you done in the last year? Lose any patients? (Does my insurance cover any of this?) But that's for tomorrow when the last of the anesthetic has worn off and I've had a decent night's sleep.

For other complicated reasons I'd had a number of these endoscopies twenty years ago in Napa, this one much the same. You strip to the waist, they have you put on a surgeon's gown tying it in the back, you lie down on a gurney, they set up an IV drip on the back of a hand, they wheel you into what looks like the bridge of a small star ship, you look at the various instruments, they inject something into the IV tube and you wake up later at the place you started foggy headed and tired. There was a piece of paper with a diagram and a note from the doctor attached. They'd taken a couple of samples to run biopsies, but his note said they looked normal, not need to fret. Endoscopy finished, out the door please, you're done.

So, they're saying laparoscopic surgery to fix this thing, two, maybe three days in the hospital, watch your diet at home for two weeks and bingo, you're ready to go back to your decadent ways. They can reoccur, the little rascals, but not often and only about one in a hundred who roll into the operating theater don't make it back. Or something like that. I'm too close to this at the moment. I'll do more Googling before I commit, check with friends and relatives, throw the I Ching, take my meds. And, as I said, fiddle with the way I eat and see if I can reliably stop these stomach aches and skip the surgery altogether or until the stomach aches come back. I've had too much cutting and pasting in my life and decided, after that damned jaw operation, to do my homework. Mumble.