Incision
Incision
[Two doctors wearing surgical masks are standing over a prone patient. One of them is touching the patient's chest with a scalpel.] Doctor: I'm making the incision above the left— BZZZZT! Doctor: Augh!
[Caption below the panel:] October 8th, 2004: A child swallows an "Operation" buzzer, leading to the single most difficult surgery ever performed.

Operation is a board game wherein one attempts to remove the organs of a patient, named Cavity Sam, with a pair of tweezers. A flat board has a cartoon image of a "patient", and dotted around various areas are holes inside of which contain plastic pieces representing the organs.
Additionally, each hole is lined with a metal connector, and the tweezers are made of metal, connecting via wire to the board. When the tweezers make contact with a metal connector, a buzzer sounds and a lamp on the patient's nose lights up to signal an error.
The game is notoriously difficult as the organs are quite small, and the buzzer is considered by players to be annoying, if not actually startling, particularly considering how much focus and steady hand is required to avoid the tweezers making contact with a metal connector.
In the comic, a child swallows a buzzer from such a board game, and the joke lies in the similarity between the game and actual surgery when the buzzer is brought into the mix. The title text brings this further by describing an incident where the doctor ended up removing several organs (the object of the game, but obviously not a good idea in real life). [ citation needed ]
The surgery would probably have been hard, as surgery requires concentration, [ citation needed ] with the game Operation being hard as well.
[Two doctors wearing surgical masks are standing over a prone patient. One of them is touching the patient's chest with a scalpel.] Doctor: I'm making the incision above the left— BZZZZT! Doctor: Augh!
[Caption below the panel:] October 8th, 2004: A child swallows an "Operation" buzzer, leading to the single most difficult surgery ever performed.
