If I gotta limp along for a while (OK, a while longer), I'm gonna do it in style

So a week from right now, I'll be getting ready to go in for surgery. To be specific, I'll be trying to figure out how to go another five or six hours without a sip of coffee or water until I feel the sweet release of anesthesia.

An aside: I was shocked to find that this surgery would be scheduled at 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. Just goes to show -- surgeons are a different breed than the rest of us. By 3 p.m. on most Fridays, I'm judging whether it's a 2- or 3-martini night. This guy is doing a surgery that involves bone grafting. I even asked his assistant at one point: Isn't it a little odd to schedule a surgery this complicated, that could go several hours, for a Friday afternoon? Her answer: "ALL of his surgeries are complicated." I don't think she meant it in a STFU kind of way. The message was more, "Buddy, your surgery ain't that big a deal in the grand scheme of things."

Which is good to know, and yet, of course, the nerves are starting to set in. Without going into a lot of detail, I've been taking care of a few contingencies this week, like life insurance. And where I've been able to think of this thing as still a bit of a ways off, no more. It's next week.

I'd compare it to a weird phenomenon I noticed in covering elections as long as I have. When it's January, we usually say something like "this fall," or "in November," to describe the time frame of the coming election day. Later, it becomes "the November election," and eventually, "next month's election." And then, it's "Nov. 2." But when there's a week or less to go, it becomes "Tuesday," and it always hits me like a truck -- this thing we've been working toward for months is next week, or even in a day or two.

And all this week, it's been "next Friday." Tomorrow, it'll be "Friday." Holy shit.

So I'm trying to lighten the load a little bit. I got some info this week on the course of recovery after the first surgery. Specifically, I asked, what am I going to be leaning on when I leave the hospital. It might be a walker, it might be crutches, it might be a cane. I figure eventually, it'll be a cane. And that got me thinking:

If I have to do this, maybe I can accessorize.

When I was 16 and headed for my first surgery, I went to Boys State a month before my surgery. (Yes, my political nerd-dom goes back that far. Don't judge me.) I was hobbling around pretty good with a store-bought cane that one of my parents had gotten as a gag 40th birthday present. But as a candidate for associate justice of the Texas Supreme Court, I used it to my advantage. My campaign slogan: Put the cane on the court. Don't even ask if I won, you know the answer. Though this was probably due more to the fact that I was alone among candidates in knowing that that court handles civil cases. So while my opponents all made blustery tough-on-crime speeches, I said, um, here's what the court actually does. Landslide!

But I digress. Canes are the point here. I figure between the two surgeries, I'll need one for at least a good chunk of the rest of the year. And there's no sense in being boring about it. So I went hunting for some good options:

There's the Transformer, take-advantage-of-technology option:



Or how about one that says, yes, I am a secret African shaman:



Or this one, which says, I'm so tired of explaining this damn surgery, here's what it looks like inside my leg:



And this might be my fave, because it just screams, I bought this at Skeletor's last garage sale:



Just keep in mind: This is my mental state (well, part of it anyway), with a week to go. Won't, say, next Thursday be pretty darn interesting?