Dave:1, Spleen: 0

Meet our contenders:

In the left corner, OUR DAVE:

Source of great delight to all who know and love him.

In the right corner, we have HIS SPLEEN.

According to medem.com,

"The spleen is an organ that lies behind the stomach on the left side of the abdomen. It serves as a graveyard for old or flawed red blood cells (oxygen-carrying cells) and as a storage site for blood and platelets (essential for clotting). The spleen also clears bacteria and is important for proper immune function, especially in fighting bacteria."

Also a source of great delight when functioning properly.

One fateful day, three years ago tomorrow, Dave and his spleen met up in a dark alley.

(Alright, more specifically, they met up on a football field.)

What follows is my sisterly perspective:

I called Dave on a beautiful Saturday in the fall, just to see how he was. He told me he thought he had broken a rib from being kneed in the chest while playing football and, while his friends continued to play football outside, he was going to try and sleep for awhile to see if he might feel better (he seemed to think that this was the cure for ailing ribs, and I did not try to talk him out of it--it seemed entirely reasonable to sleep off his pain).

A few hours later I got a call from my Dad, who was driving to Trenton with my brother Keith because Dave was in surgery for a ruptured spleen (alas, not a broken rib).

This was a much better phone call than Keith got, which involved merely my Dad on the other end of the line shouting "He ruptured his spleen! He ruptured his spleen!"

(In fairness to Marlo, he had been left alone for the first weekend of his life while his wife and the mother of said "he" took the first girls-weekend-get-away of her life when all of this occurred.)

Let's go back to the spleen: when I say "ruptured" I mean "split entirely in half". And, again in fairness to Marlo, the Doctor who called him said he had to get into surgery immediately and did not have time to even give details of how to find the hospital. We found out later that had Dave slept off his broken rib as he had planned, he would not have woken up.

Let me say that again: HE WOULD NOT HAVE WOKEN UP.

We are forever grateful to the fraternity brother who realized that this was a much bigger problem than a cracked bone.

Three years later we are jubilant to say:

Dave won.

Sorry spleen, we're not sorry to see you go, if that's the way it had to be.

We won too.