...Well this was great fun and all, until the night of 29 April 1961, when Rogozov started barfing all over the place, ran a temperature, and started having searing pain coursing through his abdomen. Rogozov, being a surgeon, of course managed to diagnose himself with acute appendicitis. That was the easy part. The hard part was that intense winds, freezing temperatures, and the afore-mentioned misery of the Antarctic cold season prevented him having any hope of evacuation, and he was stuck in a recently-constructed work facility with no hospital equipment, no medical personnel, and an agonizingly-painful infected internal organ that was going to kill him if he didn't get it removed in the next twenty-four hours.
Uh, fuck.
While most people would have simply died slow, excruciating deaths like chumps, Leonid Rogozov decided that he was going to will himself to live. With all the odds stacked against him, this guy decided he was going to get in there and yank the damn thing out himself – no matter how ridiculous a prospect that may have been. Sure, appendectomies are some of the easiest surgical procedures you can perform, but it's significantly less simple when you're in a makeshift operating room, working blind and upside-down while running a fever and suffering from extreme nausea, and being assisted by a bunch of uneducated manual laborers. Rogozov didn't give a shit. He ordered his men to get the medical room as sterile as possible, and then, assisted by a weatherman, a mechanic, and the base manager (who was there as back-up just in case either of the other two assistants got nauseous and passed out – never mind the fact that Rogozov was out there on his own), Rogozov laid down on the operating table, took his favorite scalpel, and sliced a five-inch incision across his own lower abdomen.
For the next hour and forty-five minutes, the super-sick, dying Leonid Rogozov operated on his own badly-infected appendix. Unable to see down into his own gaping wound, Rogozov had to work by feel alone, without gloves, and sometimes using just a mirror that was being held above him by one of his assistants (Rogozov later said that this was less helpful than you might think, because everything in the mirror is backwards and it was really screwing with him). Suffering badly from stress and illness and overall suckitude, Rogozov had to take breaks every five or ten minutes to vomit, collect his energy, or wait for the room to stop spinning, but this guy was so insanely badass that he just kept plowing through the procedure, doing whatever he needed to do to survive.
read the entire story here.
