Looking Back: Turkey in the Craw(Or The Turkey’s Revenge)
Have I got a Christmas story for you! It is one in which I came very close to being taken out- permanently! When it was all over it left me thankful to be alive and mindful that things can go drastically wrong, especially at Christmas.
Let’s set the scene. It is Saturday afternoon, Dec. 26th, 1997. A whole bunch of family from Bow Island had filled my old house in Fernie, where I lived for 25 years. It was classic Christmas pandemonium with grandkids everywhere and a whole lot of noise. A new Nintendo 64 game was going full blast somewhere and a wonderful spread of turkey supper leftovers had been set out for the gang. Everything appeared hunky dory except for one thing and that was me. Throughout that day a dull, disturbing pain had settled across my lower right mid-section, a pain-type quite foreign to me.
We all generally come to know our physiology quite well and usually recognize most going’s on within our bodies. I should say at this point that I have the metabolism and constitution of a high speed train and it rarely slows down. When late Saturday night came around I found myself stooped over with a progressively worsening dull ache in my stomach. I knew something was terribly wrong. You just know when things are not right.
As much as I hated to leave the visiting family that night I eventually did, around midnight, and checked into emergency at the Fernie Hospital. I did a serious mental review of the previous 24 hours, diet wise, at the hospital and came up blank. I had eaten fairly lightly and managed to behave myself quite well through Christmas or so I thought!
The attending physician in emergency that night (a resident in training, just to make it interesting) poked and prodded, questioned and mused and after all the checklists were run through she suggested I was showing signs of appendicitis, an affliction whose symptoms may or may not be typical depending on the individual.
Then in a bizarre last minute diagnostic move she decided to submit me to that horror of male horrors, a prostate check. From there it was all downhill folks. Personally I think that particular test was designed by women to get back at men somehow.
I was advised to go home and if it worsened even more to come back.
Well that didn’t take long and by 3 AM I was back there sitting on a gurney full of angst. The surgeon was called in and confirmed the attending’s suspicions that it was most likely my appendix.
I was checked in and scheduled for surgery right away. The apparent cause of all this pain, they felt, was a bit of a mystery organ when it comes to us humans. Or so we thought. It is about the size of your baby finger and is located at the junction of the small and large intestine. What does it do you ask? Why apparently not much of anything according to the surgeon who suggested to me that it is possible the appendix is a vestigial (evolutionary remnant) from very early man’s physiology. He informed me that they are quite a bit larger and perform an important function in creatures like rabbits. What?
I should add an update since I first crafted this story years ago and that is the fact that the appendix is now not considered a defunct organ and in fact plays important roles in both our immune system and gut health. So while this little organ can be a pain in the side at times, in the end it does have purpose
So it was that early Sunday morning they wheeled me in to surgery for the very first time in my life. Then it was count backwards from 10, 9,8 and lights out for me. Later on came a groggy memory of looking up at the surgeon and the anaesthetist, who were talking, and one was holding up a small plastic envelope with something in it. Someone said: “Hey John, look what we found in there” and then everything went black again. Much later came pain big time and my wife’s sweet smile was the first thing to greet me on regaining consciousness in my room.
The story that came from the surgeon later on was an interesting but scary one. They “went in”, so to speak, and found that the appendix was fine but then noticed an inflammation around the outside of the appendix and the surrounding area. This is usually a sign of leaking digestive juices irritating things so they proceeded to examine further up the small bowel a few feet until they found the culprit sticking out of the bowel and causing this life threatening leak. It appeared to be wooden and about the size of a long toothpick, so it was put down as that and promptly extracted along with my appendix.
I should explain that if they make a typical incision for an appendix extraction (lower right) and find that it is not inflamed they will remove it anyways. If they didn’t and down the road you wound up in a hospital and a physician saw the scar there they would assume it was from an appendectomy. What followed this Boxing Day surgery was about a week of hospital time on intravenous antibiotics, as gastrointestinal perforation is serious business.
Man has been swallowing organic and nonorganic things of different sizes for a long time now. I’m willing to bet that throughout human history more than just a few of us have been taken out by slivers of bone or wood that hung up and poked through somewhere in our systems, undetected.
This story reminded me of an amusing incident that involved my older brother, that also fortunately “came out all right”, so to speak. He was rushed to the hospital by my teary eyed mother many years ago where she informed the doctor that he had swallowed a fifty-cent-piece. In a somewhat insensitive, tongue- in-cheek fashion, the one and only Doctor Aiello said to her: “Don’t cry Mrs. Kinnear; you’ll get your fifty cents back.” And she did but man was she pissed at Aiello for that comment!
Incidentally, I wasn’t the first Fernieite through that Christmas season to swallow a foreign object and lose their appendix. I was preceded by another “toothpick” candidate on Christmas Eve! Further examination of my so called “wooden” culprit revealed it to be a fibrous ligament or cartilage from the side of a turkey leg. (a late night snack, Christmas day, that I had wolfed down). Chances are, if I wasn’t such a Cro-Magnon Scotsman in my eating habits, that bone probably would have been caught in time by me.
At any rate I survived, thanks in the most part to a sharp Irish surgeon and a host of other medical professionals. So my advice to you this season is to watch yourself at Christmas. Make sure you know what’s going down if you know what I mean!
Author’s Note. A story broke that same Christmas weekend in 1997, in Britain, about a new cell phone given as a gift which promptly disappeared. The giver dialed its number to try and locate it and astonishingly it rang in her friend’s bloodhound’s stomach. Just like my brother’s fifty cent piece, she got her cell phone back in perfect working order, two days later! And so it came to pass, so to speak.
From myself and my companions, George and Kitten, comes a wish for a beautiful family Christmas to all.
