This What?

"Date of Birth?"
"Fourteen-Two-Thirty-One".
Thus went the conversation, nurse to patient, through the curtain, from the next bed.
Hmmm, nearly eighty, I thought, tilting my left ear upwards.
"So what are you getting done today?", said the nurse.
My honed ear picks up rustling bed covers then the reply. "This".
This what?
Sympathetic murmurings from the nurse. "The doctor won't keep you long now"
What is this?
Surely some kind of explanation for the benefit of nosy bastards would have been in order.