Appendix Surgery Quotes

Tear people open when they pull out their gallbladder or remove their appendix? There’s really no other sort of surgery where the doctor prefers to just let you get torn apart rather than cut you, and I’m assuming that’s because gynecologists are just really lazy.

Now the best thinking is that the appendix serves as a reservoir for gut bacteria. About one person in every sixteen in the developed world will suffer appendicitis at some point, enough to make it the most common cause of emergency surgery. Without surgery, many appendicitis victims would die.

[My mother] related a childhood anecdote about one of her sisters who had an appendix operation and afterwards had been given a beautiful purse by another sister. My mother was fourteen at the time. Oh, how she yearned to have an exquisitely beaded purse like her sister's, but she dared not open her mouth. So guess what? She feigned a pain in her side and went the whole way with her story. Her family took her to several doctors. They were unable to produce a diagnosis and so opted for exploratory surgery. It had been a bold gamble on my mother's part, but it worked--she was given an identical little purse! When she received the coveted purse, my mother was elated despite being in physical agony from the surgery. Two nurses came in and one stuck a thermometer in her mouth. My mother said, 'Ummm, ummm,' to show the purse to the second nurse, who answered, 'Oh, for me? Why, thank you!' and took the purse! My mother was at a loss, and never figured out how to say, 'I didn't mean to give it to you. Please return it to me.' Her story poignantly reveals how painful it can be when people don't openly acknowledge their needs.

Life expectancy has increased primarily because of sanitation practices and infectious disease mitigation measures; because of emergency surgery techniques for acute and life-threatening conditions, like an inflamed appendix or trauma; and because of antibiotics to reverse life-threatening infections. In short, almost every “health miracle” we can point to is a cure for an acute issue (i.e., a problem that would kill you imminently if left unresolved). Economically, acute conditions aren’t great in our modern system, because the patient is quickly cured and no longer a customer. Starting in the 1960s, the medical system has taken the trust engendered by these acute innovations and used it to ask patients not to question its authority on chronic diseases (which can last a lifetime and thus are more profitable).

The most extraordinary story of appendectomy survival that I know of occurred aboard the U.S. submarine Seadragon in Japanese-controlled waters in the South China Sea during World War II when a sailor named Dean Rector from Kansas developed an acute and obvious case of appendicitis. With no qualified medical personnel on board, the commander ordered the ship’s pharmacist’s assistant, one Wheeler Bryson Lipes (of no known relation to the present author), to perform the surgery. Lipes protested that he had no medical training, did not know what an appendix looked like or where it was to be found, and had no surgical equipment to work with. The commander instructed him to do what he could anyway as the senior medical person aboard. Lipes’s bedside manner was not perhaps the most reassuring. His pep talk to Rector was this: “Look, Dean, I never did anything like this before, but you don’t have much chance

Some of the pictures have knife slashes across the bodies. Along the ribs. Some of them neatly decapitate the head of the naked body with scratches. These exist alongside the genuine scars mentioned before, the appendix scar and other non-surgical. They reflect each other, the eye moves back and forth. The cuts add a three-dimensional quality to each work. Not just physically, though you can almost see the depth of the knife slashes, but also because you think of Bellocq wanting to enter the photographs, to leave his trace on the bodies. When this happened, being too much of a gentleman to make them pose holding or sucking his cock, the camera on a timer, when this happened he had to romance them later with a knife. You can see the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of.

He worked at the hospital as a general surgeon, and she'd ended up asking him lots of questions about the sort of stuff he did (on that particular day he'd removed an appendix and a bile duct). She also asked about normal post-surgery recovery time and procedure times, and he had been very reassuring. They'd ended up talking for a very long time about all sorts of things, which he seemed to sense she'd been in need of. He'd said something about not over-googling health symptoms. And that had led to them talking about social media- he believed that the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became. That's why everyone hates each other nowadays, he reckoned. Because they are overloaded with non-friend friends Ever heard about Dunbar's number?