Open Patio Surgery 🪚

Ms L has been losing her sight and, despite the recent treatment that restored some of her vision, she still found it tricky to weed between the lines. The lines between the paving slabs in her patio were full of small plants trying to get some sun, grow bigger and take over the back garden. One plant was particularly successful - a tree! Ms L had consulted the council to have a tree surgeon come and remove the tree. Unfortunately, they refused the operation because the tree had been classified as a shrub!

Ms L hired two amateur tree surgeons who would dare to perform the tree-tment: Sevan and Kash. They were known for their unconventional and invasive methods. After arriving at Ms L's they put on their gloves and lifted four paving slabs surrounding the tree, making their procedure an open patio surgery! Sevan removed the weeds from the soil. Kash grabbed a saw and chopped off all the tree branches. Before cutting down the trunk, the surgeons decided that a root treatment was necessary to prevent the tree relapse. They twisted, pulled and forked the root to get the most of it out of the soil. Eventually, they removed as much as they could, but some parts remained underground. The woody invader might be not coming back anytime soon but Sevan and Kash could not exclude the probability of tree metastasis.

Sevan lifted several more paving slabs to remove the weeds growing below them. The surgeons discovered that their method, although effective for tree extraction, was disturbing the delicate balance of the pati(o)ent's system. The slab-lift approach was time-consuming and the squares were not easy to fit back into the places they had been occupying originally. The doctors couldn't prolong the operation for too long, so they decided to focus on other things. Sevan pulled the ivy crawling up the house wall while Kash collected all the trimmings Ms L had cut before and left on the paving - that would prevent a dangerous patio infection later on!

When it was time to wrap up, Sevan tested the pati(o)ent's condition. It wasn't stable. The paving slabs that he lifted were quite wobbly. Ms L said that they had been unsteady even before the surgeons arrived. She was very happy about the state of her patio and about the light coming into the garden once the tree was gone. Sevan and Kash bagged the trimmings and took the waste bags to the front of the house, then headed for lunch before their next operation in the same ward.