Cosmic retribution

A few weeks ago, my collaborator and I had decided to limit the focus of our paper and delete a section. Two weeks ago, when he sent me the file for me to work on, I noticed that he had indeed deleted the section. However, he had not deleted Appendix C, which was only used by that section. Therefore I quickly struck it before setting to work on another part of the paper. Little did I know how dearly this would cost me, for within the next three days, the appendices struck back. I started to feel the pain on Wednesday, and then late Friday afternoon, I had the CT to prove it, I had appendicitis. There's nothing like your doctors telling you that they've called ahead to the emergency room to let them know you're coming, only to have to wait 12 hours to finally get to the OR. And throughout all this, I'm fully alert and not in any pain unless I move suddenly or poke my abdomen, and really how often do you do poke yourself in the abdomen? As I lay there on the gurney for the three hours before they took me upstairs to a room to wait, all I could think of was the Paddy Chayefski film The Hospital and specifically, the line "The intern took his history, and then he was simply forgotten to death."