Surgery

 Successful surgery often means that you are free of whatever was destroying or inhibiting your health.  You have a broken leg and it gets fixed.  Maybe it will now be stronger than ever.  You get a new knee.  Better than the one you had.  Fixed.  But there is no such surgery for addiction.  You are one step away from a relapse.  One drink, one fix will do it.  With humility one can accept this.  What such a person can have is a daily reprieve, not a surgical fix or a pill.  If you were told that surgery took away a cancer, but it could come back unless you did such and such on a daily basis, you would do such and such on a daily basis.  Addicts are often not wired that way.  They start to feel good from recovery, and stop doing the daily such and such.  They go back to their addiction and die.  Not from old age.