Don't look inside.

It's a common story. A young lady, slightly obese, has high stress and intermittent belly pain. Belly pain is troubling, so is the stress and the two dovetail together until she decides:

enough.

So she comes in, argues her way into gallbladder surgery based on her family history, the fact that she is pretty charming, and the additional fact that gallbladders really aren't all that necessary. She gets scheduled for a laparoscopic cholecystectomy, and that is where I meet her.

Laparoscopic surgery is incredible. It seems just like what aliens would do to us if we were abducted. You poke a small hole into a patient's belly and inflate them with gas to give yourself room to work, and insert a camera through it. You then poke 3 to 4 more holes (more if needed) and insert long instruments through these. Cautery, sutures, clamps and needles all at the end of slender metal rods. From there the surgery becomes a video game. The coolest fucking video game ever. You glide over the liver, slide membranes out of the way, run loops of bowel over each other. You are the magic school bus.

We were inside our lady. Her belly distended from the carbon dioxide we'd inflated her with, the faint red light of our camera illuminated her skin from the inside out. We glanced at the span of her liver, and something was wrong. Large blue domes dotted the vista of her liver, each dome full of tangled blood vessels. There was something beautiful and alien about the landscape her liver created. Something dangerous. We poked one of the domes, nothing happened. It didn't yield. We took a picture. Then we took our her gallbladder. Then we thought about it some more and snipped out a piece of one of the domes and sent it to pathology for studies.

Four days later a note popped up in her chart -- her pathology was back. She had an aggressive small cell cancer, metastasized to her liver, and clinically probably less than one year to live.

And her belly still hurts.