A few days ago, someone asked about the rather impressive scar on my left thigh. I don’t think about it often, and sometimes blow it off as a “surfing injury,” but I told the story again about how I had a tumor on my femur and I had surgery at age 3, followed by being in a hip-to-toes cast for what seemed like months (I have no idea how long it actually was), and had to have the surgery repeated at age 5 when the tumor grew back. Apparently, it was too close to the knee joint for them to excise all of the tumor the first time. I usually spice up the story by mentioning my grandmother talking to me when I was about 19, and saying how distressed she was. I ask why she was so upset, and she said “Oh, Honey, they were going to cut off your leg.” I was standing, and had to sit down because I got weak in the knees. Naturally, no one had mentioned to 3- or 5-year-old me that amputation was anticipated. The tumor turned out to be benign so — except for an eternity in a huge cast — the effect on my life was minimal.
Having been brought back to thinking about that, my brain went down a few rabbit holes. What if (early 1960’s) modern health care hadn’t been available to me? Would I have lived? Would my leg have been functionally deformed, or would it just have had a big lump on it? Have I been living on borrowed time all these years?
Yes I have, but for a different reason. I have another scar, on my abdomen, which most people assume is an appendectomy scar. It isn’t; I still have my appendix and hope I don’t die someday from appendicitis because a doctor mistakenly thinks it has already been taken out.
The scar is from a pyloromyotomy: surgery I had at a few weeks of age to correct pyloric stenosis. Without surgery, pyloric stenosis was usually fatal. I wouldn’t have lived nearly long enough to have the leg surgery at 3 years of age. So as frustrated and angry as I can get at the big, heartless money machine that western medicine has become, I owe my entire life to a surgical intervention when I was only weeks old.
—2p