Appendicitis

A friend (who reads this blog and who many others of you that read it will know) has just had to have an emergency appendicectomy.

The appendix is a totally useless organ in human beings, left attached to our large intestine as a hang over from evolution. It performs no function and we can live perfectly well without it.

I had mine removed in my mid twenties after two years of excruciating stomach aches and occasional bouts of alternating diarrhoea and vomiting. In the end, I had to go privately to have it done since the NHS refused to do anything about it until it burst. I saw a private doctor, and it was whipped out within four working days. I spent a week dragging out my time in a luxurious private hospital being waited on hand and foot.

Apart from the feeling of total relaxation (despite the residual pain) after the darn thing was removed, my abiding memory is of the incredible amount of pain I had experienced beforehand. The sort of pain which doubles you up in agony, feels like your insides are being stabbed time and again with a very large kitchen knife and makes you terrified of eating anything as once you do, you can guarantee it will come back out again one way or another. I had no temperature or fever, and outwardly no obvious symptoms (ie no swellings, bruising where blood was pooling and no hard lumps).

Apparently, my appendix was about nine inches long (naturally, until they go wrong, they are about three inches long) and full of grape pips. Serves me right for being a lazy soft fruit eater. When I went for the follow up appointment with the consultant about a month later, he offered the offending organ to me in a bottle of formalin as a souvenir – I declined, although it would have been a talking point at dinner parties!

A burst appendix is, of course, life threatening. Peritonitis (that’s what it’s called – aren’t I clever [OK, not really]) fills the blood with poison and potentially stops the heart which cannot cope with the shock. If that happens, you need to get yourself to hospital pretty darned quick or you’ve had it. Fortunately, that isn’t what happened to me and it isn’t, as far as I know, what has happened to my friend.

It’s peculiar that nature hasn’t ironed out these anatomical gremlins by now, isn’t it? Why retain an organ which is useless and so problematic? Most species would have got rid of it by now but perhaps that’s a penalty of being such a highly evolved species, in that it will take several more thousands of years for that to happen. And while nature is about it, perhaps it can do something about the other evolutionary oddities us humans are saddled with – for instance :-

·         Locating your nose above your mouth. Very inconvenient if you have a cold.

·         Feet – ugly and odd, but which do have the bonus of allowing you to buy copious pairs of shoes

·         Women having periods which actually expel body waste instead of absorbing it back internally, like other mammals do

·         The menopause

·         Excessive nose hair

·         Spots

Yes, that would be good. Any more?