Seven things I've done once that I don't plan to ever do again

1. Ride in a helicopter (sometime in the early 1990s from an anesthesia meeting hotel to Houston International Airport)

2. Ride on a motorcycle as a passenger (behind a med school classmate on the San Diego Freeway [north] from West Los Angeles to the Sepulveda Veterans Administration Hospital during a psychiatry rotation in 1973. I never opened my eyes once while we were on the freeway. I found a car ride home.)

3. Reintubate a patient in the prone [face down] position midway through a spinal fusion (once I ignored the fact that I was on my back under the drapes on the OR floor, it was pretty much the same process as doing it the routine way — except that instead of lifting the laryngoscope handle, I had to pull down — hard! — on it.)

4. Write a play (the one I completed was accepted for performance but then the theater company went kaput)

5. Write a novel (a medical thriller whose premise remains valid today. Once in a while I think about serializing it in bookofjoe but the thought quickly passes.)

6. Climb to an altitude of nearly 18,000 feet (above, a photo of the Thorong La Pass in the Nepalese Himalayas [not my very own, but the same route I took]. I was in very good shape at the time, with 5K times under 20 minutes back home in LA. I noticed no alterations in my vision, but I was breathing very rapidly and heavily and moving my feet ever so slowly forward, taking about one step every 5-10 seconds.)

7. Eat Vietnamese beef jerky that was actually hairy, with brown strands about a quarter-inch long covering it (in Cincinnati). Once you closed your eyes and concentrated on chewing, it wasn't nearly as bad as it sounds. Still...)

I'm interested in your contributions to this category, which I'll call "one and done."