I’m glad I was contacted by Debbie from Suburb Sanity about a comment I left at This Girl’s Life …I was having a little brain lapse and couldn’t figure out what to say today. I guess you don’t just make comments about your mother’s appendix and get away with it. The premise of that post was to name the thing that (God forbid) if you die, you would hate to have everyone find as they went through your stuff.

I’m an only child. I got all my mom’s attention. All the good and the bad and the weird. My mother for some unknown reason kept her appendix in a jar. Maybe you have one too. It was in the top drawer of her dresser (she had one of those tall ones) and for the first few years of my life she would have to take it out so I could see it. Once I grew up a little, I was able to reach up and get it out on my own. It was probably only a semi-annual thing. Not like I was taking a peak all the time.

I found it weirdly amusing and not strange at all. See I come from a family of doctors…a lot of them. I was supposed to be one. Until I cut my finger on a pool table at age 13 and passed out. That was the end of my medical career. Now I’m considered the one who never amounted to much. “Oh, she’s a MOM”… “Just call your cousins, the DOCTORS if you need anything”

Doesn’t matter, organs in a jar are still cool and in formaldehyde are even cooler. Until you have to go through your mom’s stuff years later. My mom died in 2001. It had been a while since I had peaked in those drawers, but now it was all up to me. My mom never threw anything away…boy I’m still living that dream. And there was the appendix. Dried up and shriveled with no formaldehyde left. Maybe if I had gone to Jefferson Medical I would have known that the juice doesn’t last forever and what was a cool organ now looked like a semi wet/ semi dried root.

if you are from a non-medical background, or get grossed out easily, you may not want to look at the picture…

Again, doesn’t matter. I still can’t throw it out. And I can’t let my kids see it. They are biologically too far removed from the DOCTORS in the family to be able to stomach that kind of thing. If I die, maybe you guys can tell them…top drawer on the left…close your eyes and toss it all out…

You aren’t coming back now are you?