Drumroll Please

Eventually I remember my important pre-surgical question and look under my gown to find the answer:

No bag.

(Insert cheers and fireworks here.)

Beyond the lack of bag, the end result of the surgery is actually sort of amazing. 

About twenty years ago one of my college roommates had an emergency appendectomy. After a few days he returned to the dorm swaddled in an unbelievable amount of gauze. There was gauze everywhere. And for weeks he was swapping out used gauze for sterile, and giving a few of the others the heebie-jeebies by leaving his medical waste in the shared bathroom trashcans. 

Twenty years later, I've had my appendix -- not to mention an extra forty centimeters of colon -- removed and there's not a piece of gauze, or even a suture, to be seen. Instead, I've got a five inch incision running vertically from about an inch below my navel up to the center of my stomach that seems to have been superglued together. And that's it. No gauze. No band aid. Nothing besides the superglue.

Ain't progress great?