My Surgery

But first a little background.

When I was 14, I had a weird surgery.

The cartilage in my rib cage was ... extra productive, and it grew WAY to long. The pressure built up (unbeknownst to me) until I got thrown from a horse, at which point it began to buckle inward and push on my lung.

The fancy name for this is pectus excavatum.

(Tangent)
I'm convinced that doctors purposefully come up with random, convoluted names for things, mostly so they can sound smarter than the rest of us.

And it works.
(End Tangent)

In the hospital, the prep video they showed me the night before was for an open-heart surgery (since they didn't have a pectus excavatum surgery video). The doctor said the only difference is that they weren't going to lift my heart out of the chest cavity.

I spent a week of recovery in the hospital eating Jello.

(Tangent)
My first solid food was toward the end of the week, and even though the noodles tasted like soap, it was STILL heaven on earth.
(End Tangent)

Everything is fine now, but the doctor neglected to tell me one minor detail.

For the rest of my life, I'll have a numb spot about the size of a dinner plate on my chest. Granted, I still would have gone through with it had I known, but it was an unsettling feeling to realize I could no longer feel anything there.