Simple, but vital

Thought this little tidbit in Peter King's weekly column was interesting:

I'm sitting on the edge of a hospital bed in Massachusetts General Hospital-West when my surgeon approaches. It's Thomas Gill, the Red Sox and Patriots orthopedist. He's the third person out of eight or nine who would ask me the same question that day: "Which knee are we operating on today?'' I tell him the left one, and he takes a marker and writes "YES'' above my left kneecap. "The reason we don't put an 'X' here,'' he says, "is because if you put an 'X' there, how do you know that's NOT the one to operate on?''

You have to know that there was an event at some point that made this necessary. I can just hear the surgeon saying, "Okay so the left knee...now was that his left or my left? Scapel, please...."