Photo courtesy of Emily Lodish

Right, so, I have two spleens. I’m not sure what the odds of that are, but I will tell you, based on the look on the ultrasound technician’s face, that I do not believe they are high.

I had come to get an ultrasound because the doctors thought there might be something wrong with my kidneys. I wasn’t particularly worried, nor was I in any pain despite the fact that they make you drink way, way too much before one of those things and my bladder, which has never been a strong point, was about to burst.

In the waiting room, a lady leaned over to me and told me how happy I would be when I saw the little guy squirming around for the first time. “I hope not,” I said. “I’m here about my kidneys.”

It was finally my turn and there I lay on the examination table: shirt pushed up, pants rolled down and goo spread across my belly, gazing at my innards on a little fuzzy screen. It was a strange and relatively compromised position to be in, but it didn’t phase me much since I couldn’t really make sense of what I saw on the screen.

Neither, it so happened, could the technician. She went back and forth over my belly with her cold little wand what felt like a few too many times. “How’s it looking?” I asked. My right kidney was fine, she said. “I’m trying to see your left kidney, but you’ve got an extra spleen and it’s in the way.”

Pardon? I didn’t know what one spleen did, let alone the ramifications of having two. All I knew was that a lady who had probably seen thousands of the things was furrowing her brow at mine.

I left the examination slightly unsettled. What I quickly realized was that while I had never had the occasion to gaze at my insides before, I had always had a tacit understanding about what was going on in there. Then, in one fell swoop it was all dashed. There is nothing so foreign as the place we call home.
It was time to get reacquainted with myself. I started doing some research and discovered that the spleen is a multi-faceted and dynamic organ, one that wears many hats, so to speak. Among its varied duties is serving as a retirement ground for red bloods cells that just can’t take it any more and providing a home for a standing army of monocytes that attack in the name of the immune system when called upon.

Even more interesting than its physiological purpose(s) is the folk history. The Greeks were the ones who associated its black bile with melancholy, though they were also the ones who said good-spleened when they meant good-hearted, as we know it today. The Talmud considers the spleen to be the Minister of Laughter, and the French say “Je suis splenetique,” when they mean “I am sad, like, pensively sad.” All of a sudden there was an awful lot going on in there.

My whole life snapped into more chiseled focus. My past made better sense. All those times it felt like I had overreacted were suddenly justified. “Catastrophizing”—my mother’s term—was no longer pejorative. It was, simply put, my biology. Crying for three months over a one-night stand. This was part of my bodily reality. Throwing myself onto the floor in desperation over a term paper. Staying in bed for a week when I didn’t make it into the talent show. Of course I feel things deeply, I have two spleens!

My father tried to convince me that it was more common than one would think to have two spleens (My father was a physician who had authority on such matters). But I liked the idea of it being uncommon. My middle name is Sara, pronounced the regular way, but from an early age I latched onto the fact that it was spelled without an “h” and would always say to people, “My middle name is Sara, without the ‘h.’ Sah-ruh.”

It was tough having two of the most popular girls’ names for an entire decade. Growing up in cushy Bethesda. Being entirely mediocre at sports and relatively mousy to boot. I had to take it where I could get it. And so supine on the examination table, alienated and an official minority, I had finally found my special. I was thrilled.

ODDS QUESTION: What are the odds a person has two spleens? We don’t have those yet, but we do know that about 1 in 10,000 has inverted organs.

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