Ruptured Appendix

April 10, 2007 by Dr. Mc.

I know it’s not good to go more than a week without posting to a blog, but I have a pretty good excuse. Wednesday night was a rough one, and Thursday morning the abdominal pains were so bad I asked my wife to drive me to the ER. X-rays revealed nothing, so why had my intestines shut down? It was Monday afternoon before exploratory optical surgery revealed a major abscess and a ruptured appendix. Yes, I could well have died, as many have told me, but that’s not the most amazing part. Apparently, when the appendix ruptured and began to abscess, parts of my intestines moved over to block off the infection from the rest of my body. Then a fiber began to form that knitted the intestines into the new position, so nothing could seep past. This reduced my pain (confusing the doctors), and prevented the infection from quickly spreading throughout my abdominal cavity, which likely would have been fatal.

Now for the truly amazing part: What my body did was above and beyond the standard call of duty. That the body would wall off infection is not unknown to doctors, but think about the context. This is an infection response that cannot be described in terms of chemical processes. Notice that the description above speaks of the event as what the body did in response to a need. That’s the only way to make sense of what happened. That can only be done from a Design position. There is nothing in evolutionary theory that can explain response to a need. The best evolutionary theory has to offer in explanation of the immune system is that natural selection would preserve good things; not cause them. And in my case, as with many others, the body’s good response was not needed until past child-bearing years. The whole immune system is a huge enigma to evolutionary theory.

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