Here is what I did.
My car was paid off so I used the equity in it to get a cash out refi on in through my credit union. I'm getting a loan for $5,500 (The surgery is only $4,400 with Dr. Jalil Illan, but I wanted a large cushion for airfare and extra hotel nights) for four years at 2.72% with a payment of about $121 a month. The rate would have been 2.47 if my husbands work did direct deposit, but they don't . Still, I'll only be paying about $300 in interest if I take the full four years to pay for it. And there are no fees at all with the loan. Gotta love credit unions!
I figure that I can break even with taking the payment out of my food budget because of how much less I'll be eating. I already spend more money on groceries buying whole clean foods (plus some Protein powders), so there won't be any change what I buy for groceries, just how much I buy.
So.................. If you are looking for a way to finance your surgery... Banks (at least north coast credit union) will cash out up to 100% of a cars value with a refi. So like if it is worth $8,000 and you owe $2000 you can get $6,000 cash out of your car. I guess people get cash out of their cars all the time. I never knew it was a thing until I asked my bank about it. We had used the bank to buy from a private party when we got my suv and because we were financing less than the retail value of the car we were able to get a little extra cash at the time to have money for new tires and to fix the window. That is where I got the idea. FYI, my bank used NADDA retail value for it's valuation.