I'm mixed up inside. Literally.

I was in high school, I think (maybe even middle school), and I was having a lot of stomach problems, so I went to the doctor and had a whole bunch of tests run. One of those tests was an ultrasound, which was administered by a technician and someone else (it may have been another technician-- memories get fuzzy over time). I'm lying there and these two people are looking at the images of my stomach, when all of a sudden one of them says, "What is that? That's not supposed to be there!"

Being a sane and rational person, I did not get alarmed (yeah, right). I panicked. I thought I was going to die, especially when they continued uttering surprised statements such as the first one. By the end of it, I was convinced that I had less than three months to live. The time I spent waiting for the doctor to come in seemed like eternity. I just knew the end was coming.

As it turns out, I was not dying. I have a condition called malrotation of the intestines, which put simply means that everything in my abdomen is all switched around. It occurs in approximately 1 out of every 500 births. (So my odds of getting a fellowship to graduate school were greater than my odds of being born with malrotation-- and we see which I ended up with.) Babies can sometimes have severe complications with it, and most babies with malrotation end up having surgery to correct it. In some people (i.e. me) it isn't detected until later and may very well never cause any problems (let's hope not!).

The biggest difference between me and everybody else is the location of my appendix. Yours is on the right side, mine is on the left. This could be quite unfortunate if I ever develop a case of appendicitis and am not capable of telling the doctor that my appendix is on the wrong side. It's actually such a big deal that they remove the appendix from babies when they discover malrotation just to avoid the difficulty of diagnosing appendicitis should they ever develop it.

So there you have it. I am all mixed up inside. I guess this makes me quirky, if I didn't qualify already. Now that you know, it is your responsibility to make sure no doctor ever cuts me open only to discover that things aren't where they're supposed to be. I wonder if they make a medical bracelet for this?