I save a life with the power of my anecdote...

I have the habit of telling people anecdotes about my life. Something will remind me of something else and I'm compelled to give people the gift of my life lessons. It's my way of paying it forward... or maybe I just like to talk...

An example of this is when I got a toilet the other day. I had a work friend help me with it off the shelf. As I was looking at it, I pointed out the rating of the toilet by an independent study. I told him that when they test this stuff, they use a paste that they make out of a soybean soup mix that resembles the consistency of the average fecal matter. They then give it a rating based on how many grams it can flush.

He replied that he knew that because I had told everyone on my work team that... while we were all eating lunch one day. I guess some people are just touchy about what you talk about at lunch.

I said, "Oh... That doesn't sound like me at all."

I was kidding, of course.

So today, I was calling my neighbor, Michelle, because Laura had seen a set of furniture sitting on one of our neighbor's driveway. It was an older-looking night stand, dresser, tall dresser and various pieces of furniture. We couldn't tell if it was out on the driveway because they wanted the garbage men to take it, it they're being picked up by the goodwill or it's out there for sale. When we saw it on our way to work, Laura got excited.

She liked the furniture and wondered if we should ask if we could buy it. I pointed out that when my Dad was in his prime, he would spot furniture like that on the street and then come back when it was dark to retrieve them if they were still there. I suggested that we could do this.

So when I called Michelle to see if the furniture was still there, she said that she didn't know because she hadn't been home since yesterday.

She then started to tell me that she had been thinking about me and one of my stories.

Apparently, her son had what she thought was the flu. Weeks before, something got me to tell Michelle this story about a time when my Mom thought I had the flu.

It was a Sunday night when my appendix ruptured all the way back in the Fifth grade. We had just watched the new Marty Feldman movie that was on HBO called In God We Tru$t. Marty, if you recall, played Igor in Young Frankenstein. He was also in a few goofy movies. The movie was okay, but I remember that I didn't feel so hot when I went to bed. Then I slept a restless sleep filled with bizarre dreams about that movie.

When I woke up, I was hot and I had thrown up, so I stayed home from school. I felt horrible. The day came and went and I was still sick, so I stayed home the next day, too. I started throwing up more and more. My Mom would yell at me because I wouldn't even get up to go throw up. The problem was, I was too weak to get up.

Finally, by the third day, my Mom started to suspect that this wasn't the flu. My brother, Joe, carried me upstairs and put me on my parent's bed so Mom could keep an eye on me. The TV in my parent's room had no cable. The fact that I laid there staring at soap operas and I didn't complain once sent up red flags to my mother pretty quickly!

She rushed me to our family doctor, who saw me immediately. He did some poking around my belly. I winced at a place by my belly button. They drew some blood and tested it for white blood cells. The count that returned was so high that it rivaled a leukemia patient's count. It was determined that I had a ruptured appendix. I was rushed to the hospital by my Mom, who informed me on the way that I was going to have to have an operation. I was too sick to even argue although I did whimper that I didn't want an operation at least once.

Long story short, I spent ten long and boring days in the hospital recovering from an appendix that burst behind my liver. I had a tube down my throat and some tubes sticking out of my abdomen. They even left my incision open for a day to let the infection seep out.

My Mom felt horrible. She told me that she felt like the worst mother. She felt a horrible guilt for yelling at me for throwing up because she just thought that I had the flu. I came damn close to dying.

So I had told this story to Michelle. She had this story in the back of her mind when her son got sick two days ago. When he wasn't getting any better, she took him to the emergency room. She asked them if this might be an appendix that ruptured. They did a CAT scan and sure enough, they saw that the appendix had indeed ruptured.

Michelle thanked me for telling her that story. So Mom, my funny anecdote about you feeling guilty during this time probably helped save this kid's life.

Well, maybe not his life, but it got the doctors to catch it before it got too serious. He'll be out of the hospital in a few days. Oh and that furniture is still there...