Fun with vestigial organs!

Welcome back, faithful blog viewers!

Trust me, I know who all 4 of you are! ;)

Oh my god! My cat just deleted a loooooong message I had just written! I'll do my best to remember it.

It occurred to me that people reading this blog who do not know me will think that only bad and strange things happen to me. This is not true. It's just that the bad and strange things are the most fun to write about.

Here is a strange thing that happened in September. My sister and her husband came for a visit. They live 1000 miles away, so their visits are infrequent. This time, we had planned to do "young people" things. You know, get outside, run around, do jumping jacks, fly a kite, eat a sausage, throw a banana peel at a celebrity. The normal things that we do in the OC. This is because their visits since the memorial service have been full of sifting through family heirlooms and worthless collectibles.

A few hours of scraping old food off the stove and cat shit off the floor, and I was ready. I was stunned upon seeing my sister for two reasons. First, she had shrunk. Not in height, but in weight. She looked great! The second thing was that her hair was very short. "We don't have the same hair!" I said. You see, we ALWAYS have the same hair. My sister and I have managed a bizarre sort of hair-telepathy for years. Although it may be months between visits, our hair remains the same. Not the same across years, but strikingly, the same across miles. I worried for a moment that our hair telepathy was fading, until she said "yeah, I just donated it to locks of love." What she didn't know was that I was preparing my hair for locks of love, as well. I had decided to go an extra inch. If I had not, we would have looked the same. I sighed, hair-telepathy intact.

Our first couple of days were full of food and frivolity. It's always nice to have them around. We made a pilgrimage to San Diego to see a generous gift that my friends had had made: a plaque honoring my father. We chuckled at the inscription, which would have made him roll his eyes, and ate an ice cream cone in memory. By now, Marcie wasn't feeling well. It turns out, she hadn't been feeling well for quite a while but sucked it up for the sake of "being young".

The next morning we were at the hospital. Perforated appendix (see photo). She kept deriding the situation because it would mean extra days at my house, getting sick in a strange toilet, and generally not being able to be young. The first couple of days after that sucked in general. She felt awful. We felt awful because we couldn't help her. It was not fun. But then, when things got better, we had a great time again. And, we all agreed that the situation was the best it could have been because I was the only family member who could have handled the situation so well. Plus, I think that my brother-in-law and I got to hang out more on this trip than ever before. So, it all worked out great.

Now, I must add a caveat. I do not know for sure what exactly is in that photograph. It was handed to us with a few others following the procedure, when the surgeon described my sister's appendix as "wiley". It didn't want to come out, apparently. So, I believe that that officially counts as the day after which Marcie would have been dead without medical advances. But, probably, we all would have died at age 5 of typhoid, like they do in the Oregon Trail game, were it not for medicine. We finally evolved the technology to save us from organs we don't need anymore.