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Manipulation Under Anesthesia (Part II, Continued)

The procedure went well as far as I can tell. My knee was and is a bit tender; icing helped but I did intensive PT this morning (part evaluation) and I'm feeling it now that I'm in my office. My physical therapist suggest six more weeks of PT once a week, and that makes sense; I could bend more this morning for having had the procedure but there's still room for improvement.

I struggle, again, with the process of general anesthesia. For all my failings I have been able to rely on being observant and having a good memory for what I bear witness to. General anesthesia goes directly against that: I have experiences and at least in the beginning I converse with people with no memory afterward.

There was a period of time when I co-chaired a university task force on alcohol use, misuse, abuse. That's a story for another post. But there was significant overlap between our work with alcohol and the incidence of regretted sexual experiences, a phrase which I've learned covers a lot of territory. Apart from the task force's mission I've had conversations with experts working with students about date rape drugs and have heard the advice given during New Student Orientation (particularly but not solely to female students) to stay secure about what students ingest because there are students on our campus (and most campuses I suspect) willing to use people through evil actions for their own desires.  Decades ago a popular restaurateur near campus who was short on payroll sold rufies to students for years; it broke our hearts when the scandal broke. To put it bluntly this shit is real.

For me and my MUA it was a benevolent suppression of memory but: when it is malevolent, while there are many evil actions this always ranked up there with the worst for me, denying consequence through the theft of memory (let alone STD's, pregnancies, oh it's a long list) and denying consent through involuntary medication.

Perhaps this evil is concentrated more in environments where young privileged men who are surrounded by folk who treat women as property have too much disposable cash, i.e., at fraternities. As a rule while women seem to succeed more at single-sex schools as a rule men need enough women in their lives to see them as humans in order to become moral beings. I hesitate to push for coed schools and specifically coed dorms on this basis because it places the cost of fighting misogyny on women but it is my experience. Sending young men to single-sex boarding schools does them a great disservice.

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