The surgery happened on Thursday.
I want that in here before anything else, because it is the only part of this where the lottery ticket actually mattered.
Not the two point four million — that money was in a lawyer’s trust account and would not be accessible for eleven weeks.
The eight hundred and forty dollars.
Theo’s eight hundred and forty dollars, from our grandfather’s tools, plus a thing I did not expect.
When the clinic’s patient advocate — a retired hospital corpsman named Bernadette Pike — heard what my family had said on the phone, she made four calls in one afternoon and found a surgeon at a private orthopedic group who takes two service members a quarter at cost.
My share was eleven hundred dollars.
I had eight hundred and forty.
Bernadette covered the difference out of her own pocket and refused, for two years, to let me pay it back, and when I finally forced it on her she donated it to the clinic’s coffee fund and made a point of telling me she’d bought forty-one pounds of the good stuff with it.
So: the surgery cost eleven hundred dollars.
My parents said five thousand was impossible.
I never got the chance to find out whether they’d have paid the real number, and I have decided that not knowing is its own answer.
I walk fine now.
