Home surgery – we should practice it more often. I’m not talking about the big things like kidney transplants or open-heart surgery here, I’ll leave some things to the doctors. However, many people have yet to experience the joy and sense of accomplishment one gets from sewing up a nasty wound, or ridding oneself from that troublesome ingrown toenail.

I try to minimise my visits to the hospital or doctor, simply because I am very fond of my body. It’s the only thing that is truly mine, and I feel that I should be able to cope with most of the things that befall it. That’s not to say I wouldn’t hike on up to the emergency ward if my arm got sliced off, but I feel that general maintenance is up to me. In the same way that a driver should be able to change a fan belt and fit new sparkplugs, I think that we should be able to relocate limbs and re-attach an errant ear.

Doctors and surgeons have largely thankless tasks. They have to put up with the mundane and yet quite disgusting things that tend to go wrong with everybody’s biological baggage on a daily basis. How can a person enjoy another person’s piles? Well, the answer (by and large) is that they can’t. They may enjoy helping someone deal with a problem, but no one really loves that type of thing, least of all another person’s. I say give them a break. Let’s go to them with the exciting accidental amputations and tropical diseases, and fix the cuts and grazes ourselves.

Besides which, a person can have a ball ridding himself of all those bits and pieces of unwanted flesh that have accumulated over the years. There is very little that can compare with the satisfaction of slicing off a wart that’s been sitting malevolently on your hand for years. Say goodbye to unwanted moles, boils, warts, lumps and even fingers and toes.

And always remember the happy home surgeon’s maxim – sterilising one’s needles is key to keeping those bits together permanently.

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