This title leaves out the prefacing word “hip,” luring you in to think this is a reminisce of an old battery operated medically-themed game of the early 1960s which always reminded me of a “charged-up” version of Pick-up-Stix.

Now the events of July 24-26, in my “hip surgery diary.”

Daughter Rachel, son Jeremy, and I stayed at a motel the night before, since my apartment is small and I had to be at the hospital at 5:30.

Through the thin motel walls, for about two hours, beginning at 1 a.m., we heard what sounded every bit like a drunk in the throws of violent, strangulatory coughing and vomiting. (And me, worried that people didn’t want to read about hip replacement.) Already awake and pondering my morning operation, I said “This guy’s ‘dark night of the soul’ sounds worse than mine!”

I said to Rachel and Jeremy: “Maybe we should take him to the hospital with us!”

After being readied for surgery, I was rolled down mazes of halls and through doors, reminding me of the trailers of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” or “The Crypt Keeper” (but preferably MSTK 3000.)

Feeling cold air, I knew I had reached the operating room.The spinal was performed, then the “cocktail” of tranquilizers sent me under. The next thing I knew, it was over and I was being rolled down the hall to my room. From a wall clock, I knew I had lost three hours. But I guess my lost three hours don’t compare to Ray Milland’s “Lost Weekend” (1945), or that greatly extended “three-hour tour” of Gilligan and friends.

Then there’s the lost 30 minutes which the Old 97’s engineer Steve Broady never made up, (he made up the other 30 minutes,though,) in Danville, Virginia on September 27, 1903, a half hour forever lost.

Looking all around from my rolling bed as doors were flung open before me, I knew I had survived the operation and wasn’t in Heaven, unless Heaven looks a heckuvah lot like the old Ben Casey television show, which I never missed as a youth. (It’s probably not wise to use “heckuvah” anywhere near “Heaven,” but it beats the word from which it derives).

My doctor said all went well and I hadn’t required any blood transfusion. Hearing my surgical blood loss was minimal, I thought: “That portion of Washington family blood within me had ‘learned its lesson’ to be stingy with its ‘letting,’ perhaps influencing all of my blood to be similarly frugal in its outflowing.”

In my room, all through that first night, my ears barely detected a female voice of advanced age in the next room speaking calmly about such things as the weather, what to wear, what to eat, etc., as if her mind had regressed to some earlier day in her life. I thought back to my grandparents’ voices in North Wilkesboro and Statesville. The particular “southernness” of this lady’s voice, with its gentle inflections, soothed me, making me sad at the same time; because I realized that the homogenizing effect of the national media’s evening news anchors on our accents may mean that no such sweet, elderly, feminine voice of particular Southern “flavor” will likely still be heard years from now, since fewer youth are “taking it up.”

The “button and light” part of communicating with the nurses station made me feel sort of like Star Trek’s poor Captain Pike, with his “singular” mode of communication. But of course, two-way radio transmission, long ago invented, accompanies it.

I first thought the 8oz. cartoned milk on my hospital food tray was “off,” but it wasn’t. It was only because I had been drinking milk from plastic jugs for so long I had forgotten that “milk-and-waxed-paper taste” from the milk cartons on my lunch trays back at Granite Quarry School as a child.

Everything has gone well, so after therapy it’ll be “one leg down,” and in a few months “one leg to go.” If I were a horse, right now it would be “three legs to go,” but as someone said the other day, “If you were a horse, they would have shot you!”