You can't make this stuff up!

Bet you didn't know that a swollen left middle finger is a tell-tale symptom of a 'hot' appendix in need of immediate surgical removal. I also bet you didn't know that if the end of that swollen middle digit is tingling, it means the appendix is about to rupture.

None of this is remotely true, by the way, and has no basis whatsoever in medical fact. It is simply the latest load of crap that my subconscious mind decided to try to sell me in my sleep last night.

Apparently I was buying.

I dreamt that I went to the doctor for a swollen middle finger, and almost immediately found myself being stripped down and prepped for an emergency appendectomy right there in the doctor's waiting room.

This was one of those nightmares where my mouth wouldn't work correctly, and I couldn't get people to stand still long enough to listen to me while I tried to tell them that I had no symptoms of appendicitis; no abdominal pain, no nausea... nothing. Just a seemingly unrelated swollen finger that had started tingling ominously.

[picture the mute, half-naked, patient... waving 'the finger' in the face of everyone who passes by!]

Eerily, even though the first incision seemed imminent, nobody was making any preparations to put me under. For all the world it looked like they were going to start cutting while I was still fully awake!

I tried desperately to get the doctor's attention, but he was busy deciding between two comically large scalpels. And the receptionist, who looked like the female football coach on Glee, just kept swabbing my belly endlessly with enormous cotton balls dripping with some yellowish iodine-based antiseptic.

And then I woke up and looked at the clock. It was 4:30 AM and the partially numb middle finger of my left hand was stuck between the pillow and the headboard, and our idiot Labrador mix, Lulu, was standing on our bed, licking my stomach.

GAH!