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.
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