u/EggyOmnivore468

Content Warning: This story contains depictions of cannibalism and some gore.

I Haven't Trusted Doctors Since I Had My Appendix Removed

When I was a child, I had appendicitis. For those who don't know, appendicitis is when your appendix becomes infected. Yup. That useless vestigial leeching off your large intestine can swell with pus to nearly the size of a baseball, even bursting if the chance arrives. Very serious condition.

Luckily the surgery for that is very minimal. Barely leaves a scar.

I remember laying on the examination table inside a busy E.R., clutching my side. It felt like a hot knife working its way into my stomach with each heart beat. My eyes were practically sealed shut as I groaned through ragged breaths. My mom stood beside me, worriedly looking around for the doctor. We had been there nearly 4 hours, and she was becoming increasingly more impatient and worried.

She was always so kind. She was one of those people who felt way too much empathy for others, and the E.R. was nothing but a powder keg for her. The whole four hours in the E.R. ,  three in the waiting room and one in the actual "Clinic", she was there nervously looking around at all the injured people, overwhelmed by the thought of all the pain they were experiencing and the fact that she couldn't help, nearly giving herself a panic attack.

From across the clinic floor I heard the doctor pace over to the side of the examination table, loudly picking up my chart and flipping it open. He grunted loudly. I pried my eyes open through the pain and looked up at him. He was an older gentleman, maybe mid to late 50s. His hair was balding on the top, leaving a horseshoe of thin hair around the crown of his head. He needed a haircut.

He was very thin and tall. Almost sickly, like he hadn't eaten in a while. There was a glare across his round, impossibly thick glasses that obscured his eyes as they scrolled across my chart.

Then he started with a sudden huff

"Well then Mr...uhm...Brady?" He looked over the clipboard at me dismissively. "I'm Dr. Carter. It looks like you are having some stomach pain today?" His voice was squawky and throaty, almost birdlike.

My mother spoke on my behalf as I had curled myself into a ball on the table.
 
"Yes. He started to feel this really bad pain in his side about six hours ago, and we've been waiting here for almost four hours."

"Yes, quite" He murmured dismissively. He dropped my chart back in its holder with a loud clash.

"Roll over, let me feel"

He rolled me over onto my back and lifted my shirt, revealing my stomach. He began pressing hard with both hands, cold and scaly, around my stomach.

"Does it hurt there? How about here?"

He eventually moved to my right side, sending splinters of pain up my nerves. I let out a scream. He let up after a while, It felt like an eternity in my pain filled kid brain. He turned to my mother to give her the diagnosis. My vision was blurry and my ears were ringing as I clutched my stomach and rolled back into a fetal position on my side, curling up in a ball. I didn’t catch most of what he said to my mom, other than "We need" and "O.R." . As my vision cleared, I looked up at them. The Doctor had turned to look down at me, the glare on his glasses dissipating, giving sight to a horrid set of beady eyes, black and shrunk from the triple thick, coke bottle lenses.

He had heavy, ragged bags that sat deep under his eyes, and there was something wild, almost feral in the way he looked at me.

"Don't worry, we'll fix you up good as new." He squawked, "Lucky I'm the Head O.R. Surgeon, So I can expedite the process. We'll have you open within the hour." There was a heavy anticipation in his voice, like he couldn't wait to start slicing into me.

He turned from me and strode past my mother and out from between the two poorly drawn privacy curtains that hung from the ceiling. He stopped just beyond them and gave a high, glassy whistle out over the crowded emergency room. Two nurses in 60's styled uniforms and similar thick-lensed glasses appeared at his side. He said a few words to them that I couldn't hear. They then turned from each other and walked away, the nurses seemingly returning to whence they came.

My mother came to my side and whispered sweet reassurances to me, saying it would be alright and I'd sleep through all of it. 

"You won't feel a thing, sweetheart. But I wish you didn't have to go through this regardless. Such a terrible thing for someone so young to go through."

Her emotions had finally centered all on me, a worrying sign as to the severity of my condition. She was talking like I was 6. I was 11 and by this point I had broken 5 different bones and had nearly 2 dozen stitches (14 of which came when I stupidly tried to check the tension of my bike chain with my hand while riding it).

The nurses reappeared a few minutes later with a rolling hospital bed and a gown for me to wear. They fixed the way the curtains hung to create a room.

"We'll let you change." One of them said, Her voice was dry and hoarse. They both had pale, papery skin and the same beady, animalistic eyes as the doctor. They both turned and walked out of the makeshift room. My mother followed behind them, turning to reassure me that she would "Be Right Back.", as she closed the curtains to the front of the room.

The pain was searing as I rolled off the examination table and changed into the hospital gown, but it was far too bad for me to climb my way into the considerably taller hospital bed. I limped my way to the front curtains and poked my head out between them into the hall. My Mother was a few curtains down having a worried conversation on the phone, assumedly with my Father. The two nurses stood across from my excuse of a room, slouched forward and staring blankly into the turquoise sheets.

Their jaws hung slack and there was noise emanating from them, almost like a low ,droning croak.

"Um, excuse me." I said, "Can one of you help me into the bed? Maybe lower it or something?”

Suddenly, one of their heads twitched to look down at me, her eyes beady, black and vacant. Then, in an instant, Her head jerked to the side with a crack to lay flat with her shoulder, as if her spine had loosened and slipped out of place from the weight of her head. Just as quickly, it snapped back into place and her eyes had returned to the “Normal” state they had been, beady and starving.

“Why, of course dear.” She Croaked Hoarsely.

As she walked between the curtains, I could hear all of her bones creaking heavily. She lowered the height of the bed and pushed the stool for the examination table across the room. I crawled up into the bed and she raised it once more.

“Ready?” She asked in an almost mischievous, dry tone. I was starting to feel like there was a joke or something that I wasn’t being let in on. She began to push the bed as the other nurse, seeming drawn out of her own stupor, drew the certain wider. They wheeled me past my mother, who frantically hung up the phone and jogged to catch up. She gripped my hand tightly, practically running alongside the bed as it rolled.

They pushed me through a set of heavy, swinging double doors. The sign above read “I.C.U.”. The two nurses spun the bed around and pushed the head of it up against a wall in between yet another two cyan curtains. They pushed my mother away and in seconds flat needles were stuck and cuffs were strapped, I was hooked up to an I.V. drip and a heart rate monitor. One of the nurses walked over to a rolling cart and dispensed a syringe from one of its draws. She uncapped it as she walked back to my side and placed the end of the needle in a port along the I.V. tube.

“Ma’am, we're going to have to ask you to return to the waiting area. The O.R. is almost prepped and he will be leaving again soon.” She said to my mother as she pushed the plunger of the unknown medication.

 My mother threw her arms around me one last time, kissing my forehead and whispering, “Just be brave. Your Dad will be here when you wake up.”. With a final parting squeeze, she left me alone in the I.C.U. with the two horrid nurses. My unease didn't last long as I felt a daze wash over me and the pain in my stomach numbed. I slowly faded into unconsciousness, the last words that drift past my ear were, “Hurry Up, Lets get him in there! I can’t wait!”.

When I came to, though, the sight was not a reassuring one. I was laying flat on my back on a hard table, staring up at the drop ceiling of a very dark room. Looking down at my feet, I saw a group of doctors in surgical attire standing around me under bright surgical lights. One of them looked like he had part of one of his hands inside an incision in the side of my stomach. Retracting it, I saw he was holding a scalpel. I couldn't feel anything, but I was mortified. I had just woken up in the middle of my own surgery.

“Got it!” The doctor squawked as he placed the bloody scalpel down. “Forceps.”, He said clearly. A nurse beside him handed him what looked like a large pair of salad tongs. He stuck the open end of them into the incision and withdrew a grotesque, deep red lump of flesh roughly the size of a large orange. It looked like it was oozing yellow puss. He placed it on a tray the nurse had held out beside him and she placed in front of herself on the table. Oddly, I watched as the rest of the doctors in the room formed a line behind her, bouncing impatient. All but one in the back. He spoke,

“Is this really it, Carter? Is this seriously what you expect us to have?” He sounded angry and starving.

“Yes, James. We take what we can.” Said Dr. Carter as he prepared to stitch me up.

“WE CAN'T LIVE LIKE THIS!”, Dr. James shouted dryly, “We’re dying! I say we finish the job! We have the tools to cover it up!” He protested. It seemed the rest of the doctors had silently joined Dr. James as they all murmured in agreement.

“Fine!” Dr. Carter shouted back, “If you're that damn starving you can cut the boy up yourself!”. He turned and stormed away from the table and out of the Operating Room, but his words sent another wave of confusion through me. What did he mean by starving? My attention had been drawn to the back of the room where Dr. James was yelling, but as my eyes drifted over the crowd of doctors back to the nurse at the table, and what I saw was a grisly sight.

She had taken the scalpel and started cutting the mass into thin slices, four of which lay in a pile like ham on a deli counter. She was licking the blood and puss off of the scalpel and her fingers when Dr. James strode over and took it from her.

“Maybe I will.” He murmured as he stood beside me. He brought the scalpel down and began to cut, making two lines from the ends of my collar bone to the center for my chest, and then a third line from where the first two intersect down my stomach. Then he pulled me open.

My heart was racing and I couldn't keep my thoughts straight. The Doctor pulled the skin and muscle away in three neat flaps to expose my ribcage and all my internal organs. Whatever blend or narcotics I was on had to be intense, because I didn’t feel a thing. I however felt desperately exposed at the sight of my own ribs rising and falling with my breaths and my intestines squirming in digestion.

The doctor took his free left hand and wrapped it around a loop in my small intestine, and simply started to pull. He reached his arm back as far as he could behind himself and handed it to the nurse. She took it rabidly from him and handed it to the next doctor behind her as Dr. James fed more of it out of me. I felt dizzy as I watched it all, and a terrible sound of gnashing teeth and meat being chewed through the room. They were eating me.

As the doctor finished pulling out all of my intestines, he cut the end of the small one from my stomach and let it be pulled into the hoard of feral doctors and nurses. Then he cut my stomach from my esophagus and threw it over his shoulder as if he couldn’t be bothered with it. He spoke again,

“Bone Hammer” He requested of the nurse, she looked at him puzzled.

“Doctor, are you sure? Have we not had our fill?”

“No, it has been quite some time since I had a decent meal. Now give me the bone hammer, and go get the CPB ready”

She placed the hammer in his outstretched hand and scoured off to fulfill his order. Turning back to me, he raised the hammer and brought it down on my sternum, cracking my ribs. He continued swinging with no regard as he shattered bones, stopping occasionally to pick fragments out to give to waiting doctors, like appetizers at a barbeque. Finally he laid the hammer down, my ribs now completely gone to reveal my heart, lungs and liver. The nurse came to my other side pushing a large machine with several tubes and pumps.

The doctor began by pulling my liver and kidneys out and placing them beside him on the stainless steel table. Then he cut my lungs from my trachea and all the valves to my heart. I felt nothing and my vision grew blurry as the heart monitor held out a dreadful continuous note, I thought I was dead. My vision faded to black and the last thing I heard before losing consciousness again was the faint echo of the heart monitor.
Then I woke up again. In a normal hospital room. Both of my parents were sitting beside me as I came to, and they were talking to Doctor James.

“Yes Ma’am, everything was a success. We caught it just in time too.”

Something was different about him, and the rest of the doctors and nurses that would stroll through my room during my 24 hour recovery period. They all seemed more alive, more alert. Gone were the beady eyes and hungry stares. Their voices, which once sounded as if they had never known water, turned smooth and crisp, and their skin took on a more human tone.

I’m not sure what really happened in that operating room that day, but I changed too. My heart feels lopsided, pumping out of time with itself. Every time I inhale my chest rattles and groans like a vacuum pump drawing air, and I’ve never seemed to be able to get drunk. Every day something seems to get worse with me. Random onsets of stomach pains and periods of not being able to breath.

I thought I was crazy at first, so I took refuge in the bathroom to inspect myself, but there was no evidence. Whatever they did, Dr. James was right, they had the tools to cover it up. The only thing I had to show that I was even in operation was a thin cut on my right side held closed by six stitches, giving me a round 2 dozen. And the funniest part, it barely left a scar.