>La Grande Observer | Union and Wallowa Counties' News Leader

Some things you just never want to hear.

“A family of screamers is moving in next door.”

“The tax audit should be relatively painless.”

“We can move up your prostate exam appointment an hour.”

“You’ve just set a surgical center record for incisions with 13, beating the old mark of 12.”

Thankfully, I’ve got great neighbors, I’m in an income bracket that you’d be crazy to audit and my prostate is fine. But I did recently set a Walla Walla medical facility record for incisions.

Maybe the reason no plaque is forthcoming is my excessive whining. But once the anesthesia wore off, the pain was enough to induce eyelid cramps — even though it was mainly centered in the wallet region.

Still, surgery does have benefits.

As an anxiously aging baby boomer undergoing a 3 1/2-hour surgery for vascular problems in my right leg, I was on a heart monitor. Besides me, only the surgeon and nurse were in the room. In a rare moment of lucidity, I asked if the pain-killing drugs were affecting my heart rate, which was 60 beats a minute.

They said no.

Perhaps just as there is a calm in the eye of a hurricane, there is calm in the center of a surgery.

Later, I stopped by a pharmacy to fill a happy-pill prescription and hone my waiting skills. I passed the minutes by checking my blood pressure. Crowds of people swirled around also in need of FDA-approved pharmaceuticals, plus a few middle-aged hypochondriacs who enjoy hanging out in pill-intensive areas.

In this mass of humanity, my heart rate registered 80 beats per minute, or 20 beats faster per minute than when my leg was under the knife.

Finally, I thought, here’s scientific proof of my congenital shyness. However, a co-worker who understands the vagaries of the heart suggested the higher rate could be due to the long walk from the big-box store parking lot.

Still, I wasn’t ready to give up my hypothesis. Consider the possibilities — a heart rate slower surrounded by a handful of wackos than in a crowd of 500 sophisticates at a symphony concert. A heart rate slower with a bull suffering from wild mood swings than with a herd of contented Jersey cows.

Admittedly, the theory fails the bull test.

Whatever the truth is, it’s important not to overwork the heart, that most amazing of machines. For an average person the heart beats 100,000 times a day. In that time it pumps 1,600 gallons of blood over 60,000 miles of vessels.

If crowds impact heart rate, deliberately downshifting out of the fast lane and living in sparsely populated Northeast Oregon is a smart choice.

Sure, we who choose to live in this scenic, uncrowded paradise occasionally marinate in boredom. But I figure it this way. Pursuing simple pleasures in a town of 600, such as Cove, which by the way has plenty of intellectuals and symphony lovers, my heart will beat hundreds of thousands of times less often over a decade than it would in a city of 12,000 like La Grande, and millions of times less than if I lived in a metropolis of 400,000 like Portland.

For me, downright dull is life-enhancing. Grinding boredom is a health movement.

The road less trampled is the road I deliberately choose, and sensory deprivation is one of its many rewards.

Now can someone find an anesthesia that would reduce the pain in my wallet region?

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