Anatomical Abnormalities

Unique. Individual. One-of-a-kind.

Those are words and phrases with positive connotations—unless they’re coming from your doctor. In terms of health, you almost never want to be one in a million. It’s much safer to be among the 999,999. I want all of my medical problems to be mundane to the point where the doctor knows what I have before I even finish describing it. His ennui is my increased chance for survival. Sad to say, that wasn’t my experience recently. Monday, I had my follow up appointment with the surgeon who operated on my wrist. The first two times I met him, he had all the enthusiasm of an accountant double checking my taxes. At our follow-up meeting eleven days after surgery, however, he was practically giddy. He couldn’t wait to tell me all the weird stuff he found inside me. Apparently, he hadn’t told my wife the full story immediately after the procedure while I was still waking up from the anesthesia. This was messed up enough that he wanted to tell me to my face.

It’s a conversation I’m unfortunately getting used to. I almost died when my appendix exploded because the insides of my abdomen are weird, too. At least that was the initial story I got from doctors. The tale has changed since then in a gradual process of revisionist history I suspect is designed to prevent the hospital from being sued. The day after surgery, the follow-up doctor told me it was partially my fault the emergency room misdiagnosed me the first time. The scan had been hard to read because I was too skinny, and my appendix had been on the left, unlike with every other human being, who has their appendix on the right. If I wanted to live, I shouldn’t have been a freak of nature. That lined up with my initial symptoms. My sharp abdominal pain had been on the left, not the right, until the final stage, at which point the pain shifted to the center. It wasn’t exactly a great day. I don’t know why I keep reliving it in this newsletter.

But a week later, when I talked to the operating surgeon at my follow-up appointment, he spun a different tale. He said my appendix was in the correct place on my right side, just like in the other 999,999. It simply exploded wrong. Rather than staying localized on the right, it shot its field of debris—I believe the exact term the surgeon used was “pus pocket”—to the middle, directly on top of my bladder. That explained my final symptoms, which included the distinct sensation that my entire urinary tract was being kicked by a mule. By then, though, the placement didn’t matter. My white blood cell count was so high that someone with no medical training whatsoever couldn't have missed the diagnosis. To save money, I should have asked a random bystander to read my test results. What it didn’t explain, however, was why, pre-explosion, my pain had only been on the left side of my abdomen, which was appendix-free the entire time. For that, the surgeon gave me yet another one of those patented medical shrugs. Apparently, I experience pain incorrectly. That’s on me.

At this point, there’s no way to ever know for sure what happened because the evidence has been destroyed. My appendix is currently a pile of ashes in the bottom of an incinerator. That’s where I hope it is, anyway. It’s possible the surgeon sold it to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not since the end of it was clogged up by, in the precise medical vernacular of the operating surgeon, the “biggest poop stone” he’d ever seen. In that aspect, I was still one in a million in a completely negative way. Being special is the worst.

That was enough anatomical individuality for one lifetime. Too bad my follow-up appointments weren’t done. Monday, I met with my wrist surgeon. I thought he was just going to remove my stitches and verify that my hand still worked. Instead, he eagerly explained that my left hand was full of things that, in nearly 30 years of cutting people open, he had never seen before. Pro-tip: If you value your health, don’t ever give your surgeon a reason to get excited. This is what he found.