Six days from the time I’m writing this, I’ll walk into a hospital, give someone the same information I’ve given to three or four people already, and wait for someone to slit my throat.

Man, it’s hard to resist a dramatic line.

But now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, yes, I will be having surgery, and no, it shouldn’t be anywhere near that high-stakes. Months and months ago, I was diagnosed with hyperparathyroidism, a big word for something caused by a tiny gland.

Here are the basics: The parathyroids are four small glands nestled behind the thyroid, itself a gland that looks like a couple of meaty mittens gripping the trachea. Their main job is to regulate calcium levels in your body.

But our bodies are a wacky funhouse of unpredictability, aren’t they? In this case, an-almost-always benign tumor makes one or more of the parathyroids take its job a little too seriously, sending out signals that my body needs a lot of calcium, which is actually too much calcium. Eventually this can cause a range of symptoms, from a vague “off” feeling of tiredness to muscle pain to kidney damage and a whole bunch of other things, including loss of bone density because your body eventually starts leeching calcium from your delicious framework.

None of this is happening to me yet.

“Yet” should be the name for a train you can’t see but know is on its way. My doctors (three at this point) all agree there’s no reason to wait at the station, much less stand on the tracks, so the plan is to take care of it before it becomes a problem. And as we all learned from Army of Darkness, when a part of your body goes bad, sometimes the best thing to do is lop it off.

Which brings us to this coming Thursday. Apparently it’s a pretty simple procedure, the glands themselves are fairly small (about the size of a grain of rice), and I’m being sent home the same day. I’m not nervous, even though everyone asking me if I am started to get me there. I keep reminding myself that I know at least a few people who’ve had their whole thyroid removed and are walking around smelling flowers and whistling past graveyards. And I mean, this isn’t even my first surgery.

I meant to reach out to a couple of friends personally to let them know what’s going on, but it felt a little too look-at-me. So instead I decided to send it to a mailing list, because I enjoy absurdity.

Also, I hate it when I find out something after the fact, and I didn’t want to do that you guys. There are a lot of other things demanding my attention lately, but for now this is the main one.

See you in about a week.