Just… wow.

Angela told us a really stunning story over dinner tonight. I just want to record it here so I’ll remember.

Angela was on trauma rotation when a 27-year-old man came in from a car accident. He’d gone through the windshield and it had torn up his side, so that his guts were spilling out.

Normally, when someone comes in in such a state, they get sent directly to the OR so they can get patched up. But for some reason, this time, the ER decided to do a CAT scan on him first.

When he got to the OR, they checked out his insides and found one of his kidneys was badly damaged. There was nothing they could do, so they took it out.

Much later, they got a call from the pathologist. He told them that the kidney they’d taken out of this young man had been cancerous. If he hadn’t been in this accident, if someone in the ER hadn’t called for a CAT scan for no apparent reason, the man would likely have died. Kidney cancer is very rare in such a young person, and it produces no symptoms until the late stages. Now, the cancerous kidney is gone, and the man is going to recover.

It just boggles the mind.