Tegan Taylor

We're going to take these out rather than just kind of whipping them out and not thinking about what potential knock-on effects there could be.

So tonsils are one of those things where whipping them out, it's no joke if you've ever had that surgery, but they're fairly accessible.

You can get to them without having to, say, open up someone's abdomen, which you have to do if you want to remove something like a gallbladder or an appendix.

Appendices especially are organs that for a long time until pretty recently, we kind of didn't really appreciate how important they were.

Not a bear.

It's a marsupial, Norman.

So that sounds really important, although an infected appendix is no joke.

And you actually, did you know, it's still a thing, you can't be a doctor, Norman, you can't be a doctor in Antarctica if you have an appendix.

Did you know this?

If you want to go to Antarctica for other reasons, it's fine.

But there's some pretty gnarly reasons why if you're the doctor, because there's usually only one in Antarctica over winter, you're not allowed to have an appendix.

Do you want to guess at what the reason for this is?

Yeah, because someone did.

Someone literally took out their own appendix in Antarctica one winter.

It was actually a Russian doctor in 1961.

His name was Leonid Rogozov.

And he, in my notes, I have this in all caps, removed his own appendix.

He got sick.

realised he was able to diagnose himself with acute appendicitis, realised there was going to be no way to evacuate him and knew that without an appendectomy he would die.

So he instructed his fellow Antarctic explorers on what to do, basically to hold the surgical retractors and a mirror, gave himself local anaesthetic, took out his own appendix.