When I was 25 I had arthroscopic knee surgery, and because I was living in Texas, one of my coworkers at the school was the person who came and picked me up and helped me fill my prescriptions. The evening after my surgery she took me out for dinner and as I crutch walked into the food court, still a little high from meds, I remember showing off to her that if I flexed my knee real fast I could make liquid shoot out of one of the incision holes. I definitely recall telling Janet “and it doesn’t even hurt!“ 

Anesthesia is an amazing thing. If you look at the Greek word translates literally as  “without sensation”. It means you can’t feel what is happening to you. Technically there are diseases that will leave you with the condition of “anesthesia.” A spinal chord injury might leave you unable to feel parts of your body. However most of the time when we use that word we’re talking about receiving an external substance that leaves us numb to pain. 

Last week Tuesday, Jarrett came into work and said “well we’ve descended into authoritarian rule now” after the government had used gas and heavily armored police to disperse the protesting crowd in Lafayette Park. I can honestly say that I had looked at the story in the news, but it didn’t register as any bigger deal than all the other crap that the President and his allies have been doing these last three years. 

Here’s a cool thing that often happens when you remove someone’s toenail:. To numb the toe for the procedure, you give a small prick  of lidocaine to the surface of each side of the base of the toe to numb the skin, and then you plunge the needle all the way down until you feel it hit the side of the bone. Then you push the medicine out right there where the nerve is passing, so the tip of the toe (and nail) go senseless. After a minute or so, it’s so asleep that many patients want to watch while you do the bloody work of pushing back the skin, clamping onto the nail with medical pliers and tugging. They often exclaim how much they can’t feel it. Sometimes they have a look of amazed glee. What I know that they do not, is that they WILL feel it later. A lot. 

I am not unaware of the killing of Breyonna Taylor in her own home, or George Floyd, or Ahmaud Arbery, or the huge list of others. Police and state violence are not just things on the news to me. I have a young patient whose elementary school classmate was shot and killed by a “stray round” when police raided a mobile home and the bullets penetrated a neighboring trailer. I live thirty miles from an immigration detention facility. These things are known to me. I actively try to rectify these wrongs with my time, my money, and my voice. I even write my congressmen (and let me tell you writing to Ted Cruz regularly is an advanced course in squandering precious time and energy). I am not blind. Nor am I ignorant. I recognize the wound. I apply the bandage to the bleeding. 
But I am anesthetized.