When I woke up from the anesthesia, my doctor was staring at me in awe. He said, “I’ve removed at least 1000 appendixes (appendices?) in my career, and yours was at least 3 times longer than the longest one I’ve ever seen.” I’m convinced that to this day he has it in a jar somewhere. But what’s even more disconcerting is that up to that time I had walked around for 35 years as a freak of nature and I didn’t even know it.
Similarly, I REALLY pissed off an endodontist once. He had already quoted me a price so he felt he had to stick to it and give me the root canal as promised. Then he found out, to his horror, that the tooth in question, which on a normal person has only two roots, had four. Two of the roots were hiding behind one of the other ones, so it didn’t show up on the x-ray, thus causing his profit margin to go up in smoke. How was I supposed to know?
The thing is, my body knew these things all along. Just like it knows how to produce stomach acid and platelets and snot, and I couldn’t do that myself if my life depended on it. It even does this from scratch, working with the ingredients on hand. Isn’t that amazing? I mean, gross, yes, but amazing.
Seriously. Think about it. You’re living inside a body that is doing stuff you can’t. Women who are pregnant with baby boys are growing penises inside their body even as we speak. Your baby teeth know exactly when they’ve overstayed their welcome. If you’re like me, you can walk around on a broken foot for two months without even realizing why it’s feeling “funny”.
Our bodies must shake their heads and laugh at us.
The View from a Drawbridge 
Ummmmm…. I also am a dental freak of nature. Lots of roots, missing tooth that never formed. I did a post about it.
I love the fact that women can grow penises… penisis… peni??? (Why can’t I get a spell checker in these comment boxes, WordPress? Nothing makes a man look stupider than not being able to spell the plural of penis!)… I must admit this has never occured to me before… unless I spelled occured wrong, and then I just never thought of it. I did, however, come up with the idea that if doctors cut the other end of the umbilical chord on girl babies, then later in life women could spell their name in the snow with pee just like we do. Maybe. I don’t know how long that plumbing works for, but if you could keep it open in both directions like inside the womb, you could even use it to breathe underwater like a long snorkel.
But there is no way my body is smarter than I am.
Well, I bet your body already knows that the whole snorkel concept wouldn’t hold water, so to speak. And as for the dental thing…we’re twins, I’m telling you.
I am adopted, so who knows?
I like how you can see immediately when you open you eyes. No warming up, no buttons to push, just instant on.
Wow. I never thought of that. How fascinating! Now I’ll think about that whenever I open my eyes, and really appreciate it. Thank you for that!
(smiling)
Those are good qualities. Although a lot of TV commercials make me WANT to slam my head though a wall. lol
I may just do that. 🙂
Will do.