Never having an operation before didn't mean I'd stay lucky my whole life — or so I found out the other day.

My Ob/Gyn told me 25 years ago that that I looked pretty good on the outside but things weren't so swell on the inside. In fact, they were mighty prolapsed.

I suspected I might need to have surgery, but I tried to avoid it. I kept my weight down, worked out and did my Kegels waiting for a red light to turn green, but I finally hit the end of the road.

No one in the world wants to have surgery unless it's really necessary, except for people like poor Michael Jackson.

I listened carefully to my doctor, a urogynecologist, explain the pros and cons of what I was facing — at my age no less. And so, dear reader, I am putting my name on the list of "those who have had operations."

By the time you read this, all should be over and done with. Supposedly I will be practically as good as new, and the surgery will only take a couple of hours to tie up all my sagging parts.

Unfortunately, not being superhuman, the healing and recovery won't be as fast. I hear it is at least a two-week process and will require a real slowdown on my part, which is not second nature for me.

Let's just hope it is successful. Great doctor; should be.

Nervous? You bet!

But there is a big club of women who have gone through similar problems, many with a bunch of young kids, so how can I complain?

Still, this procedure is not on top of my list of ways to stop and smell the roses.

This will not put me in a unique category by any means. Many of my friends are getting hip and knee replacements, having back surgery, cataract surgery — you name it.

A few of them have had minor complications, but most of them — once the healing process is over — have an amazing new quality of life.

All the medical expertise and the extraordinary procedures of today can border on the miraculous.

My dentist told me about a one-day implant procedure he did on a 95-year-old woman. She had four teeth left, so he pulled those and put in four implants in her bottom jaw. Then he screwed on the teeth. She was as good as new!

As miraculous as artificial body-part replacements are, apparently even better things are on the horizon — customized body parts.

After a successful transplant in 2008 on a Spanish woman was made using her own stem cells to grow a replacement part for her windpipe, professor Martin Birchall said: "This is just the beginning. … In 20 years' time, the commonest surgical operations will be regenerative procedures to replace organs and tissues damaged by disease with autologous (self-grown) tissues and organs from the laboratory. We are on the verge of a new age in surgical care."

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Even with all these wonderful procedures, our bodies will only last so long. The older we get, the more can go wrong, which makes the statement "growing old is not for sissies" all too true.

But there are always the consoling words of George Burns: "If you live to be one- hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age."

Now back to my operation. If you send chocolate, make it dark, please.

e-mail: sasyoung2@aol.com

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