Daniel sent us this one, and it's a bit different from the usual prompts. He's been dealing with health struggles since gallbladder surgery seven years ago, and he's looking for something specific — stories of people who've had organs removed, gallbladder or otherwise, and still managed to achieve physically demanding things. He used to surf, he misses it, and he's wondering if there are examples out there of people who've done what seems almost impossible after losing major organs. It's part practical inspiration, part "am I alone in this," and I think there's a lot to dig into here.
This is exactly the kind of question where the internet is simultaneously amazing and terrible at answering. You search "gallbladder removal athlete" and you get either medical abstracts about bile acid malabsorption in endurance runners, or forum posts where someone says "I had mine out and I ran a 5k three weeks later, you'll be fine." Neither captures the actual experience of someone dealing with chronic post-surgical gastritis for seven years.
The forum posts are the worst. "Had my gallbladder out on Tuesday, climbed Everest on Thursday, never felt better." Thanks, very helpful.
The reality is, about forty percent of people who have cholecystectomy experience some form of post-cholecystectomy syndrome. For some it's mild, for some it's debilitating, and it's not well understood why the range is so wide. So finding documented stories of high performers who dealt with this specific thing is harder than it should be.
You did find some.
And I think the most instructive one — partly because it's well documented and partly because it mirrors a lot of what the prompt describes — is a professional surfer named Lakey Peterson. She's a championship-level surfer on the World Surf League tour, and she had her gallbladder removed in twenty twenty-one.
That's almost too on the nose.
She was twenty-six, in the middle of her competitive season. She'd been dealing with what she thought was just severe stomach issues, and it turned out to be gallstones. Emergency surgery, gallbladder out, and then she had to figure out how to get back to elite-level competition in a sport where you're in cold water for hours, your core is everything, and you're eating at weird times because heats don't wait for your digestion to settle.
What actually happened when she got back in the water?
This is where it gets real. She was open about the fact that the recovery was not linear. She had to completely rework her nutrition. She went from being able to eat pretty much whatever she wanted as a high-output athlete to having to be extremely precise about fat timing, meal spacing, and what she ate before heats. She talked publicly about having to experiment with different approaches because what worked in training didn't work in competition, and vice versa.
She competed again at a high level.
She did more than compete. In twenty twenty-two, the season after her surgery, she won the MEO Pro Portugal, a Championship Tour event. She beat Carissa Moore, an Olympic gold medalist and five-time world champion, in the final. In twenty twenty-three she finished fifth in the world rankings. That's not someone who just survived the surgery and hobbled back. That's someone who adapted and performed.
What I think is most useful about her story, for the specific situation in the prompt, is that she was public about the struggle. She didn't do the thing where an athlete says "I had a minor procedure and now I'm better than ever." She talked about the dietary adjustments, the trial and error, the frustration of having good days and bad days. There's an interview she gave to The Inertia where she said — I'm paraphrasing — that it took her a full year to feel like her body was predictable again.
That's the word. When you're dealing with post-surgical digestive issues, it's not that you're in agony every moment. It's that you can't trust your body. You don't know what Tuesday is going to feel like. And for an athlete, that unpredictability is almost worse than pain, because you can push through pain if you know it's coming.
That connects to something the prompt mentions — the isolation of it. If you look at Lakey Peterson's social media from that period, she's posting about wins and training and sponsor events, and it looks like everything's fine. But she gave an interview where she mentioned that behind the scenes she was working with a nutritionist multiple times a week and keeping detailed food journals just to figure out what wouldn't trigger an episode during a heat. That invisible labor is the part nobody sees.
The Instagram version of recovery versus the food journal version. I think that's actually more encouraging than the "I bounced back in two weeks" stories, because it acknowledges the work. It says, this was hard, it took time, and it was worth doing.
Let me give you one from a completely different sport. There's a British ultra-endurance cyclist named Josh Quigley. He's known for attempting the around-the-world cycling record. He had his gallbladder removed in twenty nineteen after what he described as the worst pain of his life — and this is a guy who's cycled through deserts and across continents.
Ultra-endurance cycling after gallbladder removal. That's a specific kind of digestive challenge, because you're eating constantly on the bike, you're burning enormous amounts of calories, and you can't exactly stop for a careful sit-down meal every three hours.
That's exactly what he had to figure out. The standard ultra-cycling nutrition is basically eating whatever you can stomach — a lot of it is high-fat, high-sugar, processed stuff because that's what's calorie-dense and portable. After the surgery, he couldn't do that anymore. He had to switch to more frequent, smaller feeds, lower fat, different composition entirely. It took him months of experimentation to find a protocol that worked for hundred-mile-plus days. In twenty twenty-three, he set the British record for cycling the North Coast 500 — a five-hundred-mile route through the Scottish Highlands — in just over twenty-nine hours. And he's currently preparing for another around-the-world record attempt.
I think what's emerging here is that the inspiring part isn't the surgery or the recovery. It's the problem-solving. These are people who treated their post-surgical body as a new system to learn, not a broken version of the old system.
That's exactly the right framing. When you remove the gallbladder, you're not just removing a storage sac. You're changing the entire bile delivery system. Instead of bile being concentrated and released in pulses when you eat fat, it just drips continuously into the small intestine. That changes how you digest everything, not just fat. It changes your gut microbiome, your hormone signaling, your bowel motility. You're running on fundamentally different plumbing.
Which is why the "I had mine out and I was fine" crowd is so unhelpful. Some people's systems adapt more smoothly. Some don't. And the ones who don't aren't weaker, they just drew a different physiological card.
Here's where the prompt takes an interesting turn. It says, look, if we're talking about inspiring stories of people missing organs, the gallbladder is entry-level. So let me broaden this out.
Let's start with someone who donated an organ and then went on to do something that seems almost absurd. There's a woman named Hilary Baumann. In two thousand seven, she donated one of her kidneys to a stranger — an altruistic non-directed donation. That's a major surgery. They're removing a whole organ, you're down to one kidney, and the recovery is not trivial.
What did she do after that?
She became an Ironman triathlete. Multiple Ironman finishes. An Ironman is a two-point-four-mile swim, a hundred-and-twelve-mile bike, and a full marathon run consecutively. She did this with one kidney.
That's not just a physical achievement. That's a metabolic statement. Your remaining kidney has to handle all the filtration, all the waste products from that level of exertion. If you push too hard, you're not just tired, you're in renal trouble.
She's been very open about the fact that she has to manage hydration far more carefully than two-kidney athletes. She can't just drink to thirst during a race because by the time she's thirsty, she might already be behind on kidney function. She has to pre-hydrate strategically, monitor her electrolyte balance, and she works closely with nephrologists to make sure she's not damaging her remaining kidney.
It's a similar pattern to the gallbladder athletes — the achievement is impressive, but the invisible management is the real story.
Here's another one, even more extreme. There's a man named Chris Klug, a professional snowboarder. In the nineteen nineties, he was diagnosed with primary sclerosing cholangitis — a liver disease where your bile ducts become inflamed and scarred, eventually leading to liver failure. He needed a liver transplant.
A liver transplant. That's not removing an organ, that's replacing a central metabolic factory.
He received a living donor transplant in the year two thousand. Eighteen months later, he competed in the two thousand two Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City and won a bronze medal in parallel giant slalom. He was the first transplant recipient ever to compete in the Olympics. And he didn't just compete — he medaled. He went on to compete in two thousand six and two thousand ten as well.
What's the immunosuppression situation there? Because transplant recipients are on immunosuppressant drugs for life, and those drugs have side effects that are not athlete-friendly.
That's part of what makes it so remarkable. The drugs he was on — tacrolimus and others — cause fatigue, muscle weakness, affect bone density, increase infection risk. Training at an elite level while on immunosuppressants is a completely different equation. He had to be careful about overtraining because his immune system couldn't handle the same stress. He had to avoid getting sick in ways that would be minor for other athletes but could be serious for him.
He did this for a decade of elite competition. He's been an advocate for organ donation ever since, founded the Chris Klug Foundation. But I think his story is interesting for the prompt's question because it's not just about missing an organ. It's about living with a borrowed organ, on drugs that fight against athletic performance, and still finding a way.
Let's go into genuinely rare territory. What about people who've lost multiple organs? There's a case that got a fair amount of medical literature attention. A woman in the United States — and I'm going to be careful with the name because medical privacy can be tricky — had a condition called familial adenomatous polyposis, which causes hundreds of polyps in the colon. Over the course of her life, she's had her colon removed, her stomach removed, part of her small intestine removed, her gallbladder removed, her spleen removed, and part of her pancreas removed.
That's not a medical history. That's an inventory.
It's called a total proctocolectomy, total gastrectomy, splenectomy, cholecystectomy, and partial pancreatectomy. And she runs marathons.
The physiology here is wild. With no stomach, she can't store food or digest it in the normal way. Food goes from her esophagus directly into her small intestine, which has been surgically reconstructed to act as a kind of pouch. She has to eat very small amounts constantly throughout the day. She can't absorb nutrients efficiently because so much of her digestive tract is gone. She needs regular B12 injections because without a stomach she can't produce intrinsic factor. She's at risk for dumping syndrome, where food moves too quickly through her system and causes blood sugar crashes.
Marathon running on top of that.
And the reason I bring her up is not to say "look how extreme this is." It's to say that the human body's capacity for adaptation is staggering. If someone can run twenty-six miles with no stomach, no colon, no gallbladder, and half a pancreas, then the question isn't "can you be active after gallbladder removal." The question is "what kind of adaptation does your specific body need.
That's the reframe. But I want to be careful here, because there's a risk in these extreme examples. The prompt mentions feeling isolated, and there's a version of this conversation where we just list superhuman achievements and it feels like we're saying "look, these people did it, so what's your excuse." That's not what we're doing.
These stories are not benchmarks. They're not standards you have to meet to prove you're handling your health challenges correctly. They're existence proofs. They demonstrate that the ceiling is higher than you might think, but they don't tell you where your personal ceiling is, and they certainly don't imply that not running marathons is a failure.
That's the right term. They prove that something is possible, not that it's easy or mandatory. And I think Lakey Peterson's story is actually the most useful one for the prompt's specific situation, precisely because it's not the most extreme. She had the same surgery, dealt with similar post-surgical digestive issues, had to figure out nutrition from scratch, and got back to surfing — which the prompt specifically mentions missing. She didn't win an Olympic medal with a transplanted liver. She just figured out how to surf again, while being honest about how hard it was.
Let me add one more example that bridges the gallbladder-specific and the more extreme categories. There's a professional baseball player named Jonny Venters. He was a relief pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, made the All-Star team in twenty eleven. He had multiple Tommy John surgeries on his elbow, but the relevant part is that in twenty thirteen, he also had his gallbladder removed. He was out of baseball entirely in twenty fourteen and twenty fifteen, dealing with the elbow recoveries and the post-cholecystectomy digestive adjustments. But in twenty eighteen, he made it back to the major leagues with the Tampa Bay Rays, and then was traded back to the Braves. He pitched effectively again at the highest level of his sport.
A relief pitcher has a weird schedule — irregular eating, high stress, sudden exertion. Not the easiest context for managing post-gallbladder digestion.
He talked in interviews about how the digestive issues were actually harder to manage day-to-day than the elbow rehab, because at least with the elbow, the protocol was clear. With the digestion, it was constant trial and error.
That resonates with what the prompt describes. Seven years of trial and error.
Let me broaden the lens further. There's a category of athlete that doesn't get enough attention: living organ donors who continue to compete. There's a woman named Tracy Hulick. She donated a kidney to a stranger in two thousand twelve. After recovering, she took up triathlon. She's completed multiple Ironman races, she's done ultramarathons, and she's become an advocate for living donation — specifically to counter the narrative that donating a kidney means you can't be active anymore.
The data supports that, right? Living kidney donors have normal life expectancy, normal activity levels. The remaining kidney hypertrophies, increases in size and function by about forty percent, to handle the full filtration load. But it takes time, and even after adaptation, you're working with less renal reserve. If something goes wrong with that one kidney, you don't have a backup.
I think there's a psychological dimension there that's probably understudied. The mental load of knowing your margin for error is smaller. Every hydration mistake, every overheating episode, every supplement you consider taking — it all gets filtered through the knowledge that you're running on a single kidney, or a transplanted liver, or a reconstructed digestive system.
Let's talk about the supplement angle, because it connects to the gallbladder situation specifically. Post-cholecystectomy, fat-soluble vitamin absorption can be compromised — vitamins A, D, E, and K. If you're an athlete with no gallbladder trying to train hard, you might be running deficiencies that affect bone density, immune function, recovery.
This comes up in the medical literature but is rarely discussed in fitness contexts. The gallbladder concentrates bile, and that concentrated bile is what emulsifies fats so your body can absorb fat-soluble vitamins. Without it, you're getting less efficient absorption. You might need higher intake or different forms to get the same effect. Fatigue from subclinical vitamin D deficiency looks a lot like "I guess I'm just not recovering well since the surgery." It's easy to attribute to the surgery itself rather than to a fixable nutritional gap.
Which brings us back to the food journal. Lakey Peterson keeping detailed records, working with a nutritionist multiple times a week. That wasn't obsessive. That was necessary instrumentation for a system that no longer gave clear feedback.
The body's normal signaling gets scrambled after these surgeries. Hunger, satiety, energy levels, digestive comfort — all the cues you'd normally use to guide your eating and training become unreliable. You have to rebuild the feedback loop from external data. Food journals, symptom tracking, scheduled eating rather than hunger-driven eating. It's like flying on instruments instead of visual.
Let me ask about something the prompt mentions that we haven't addressed directly. Post-cholecystectomy gastritis is a specific thing, and it's different from the bile acid diarrhea that gets all the attention in post-gallbladder discussions.
Bile reflux gastritis. When the gallbladder is gone, bile flows continuously into the small intestine, and it can reflux backward into the stomach. Bile is alkaline, not acidic, but it's still deeply irritating to the stomach lining. It causes inflammation, pain, nausea — and it doesn't respond to acid-blocking medications the way regular acid reflux does, because it's not an acid problem.
Someone dealing with this is in a particularly frustrating position. The standard post-gallbladder advice — eat smaller meals, lower fat — might help with diarrhea but not with bile reflux gastritis. And most doctors are not great at distinguishing between the two.
The treatments are different. For bile reflux, you're looking at bile acid sequestrants like cholestyramine, or medications like sucralfate that coat the stomach lining. Sometimes ursodeoxycholic acid, which changes the composition of the bile itself to make it less irritating. These are not first-line things that every gastroenterologist reaches for. And if you're an athlete trying to train through this, the symptoms are particularly incompatible with physical exertion — nausea during a workout, pain that gets worse when you're horizontal for certain exercises, the unpredictability of flare-ups.
This is where I think the Jonny Venters story is instructive. He talked about the digestive issues being harder than the elbow rehab, and I suspect this is exactly what he meant. With an elbow, you do the physical therapy, you ice it, you rest it, you come back. With post-surgical gastritis, you can do everything right and still have a bad day for no clear reason.
The isolation piece. The prompt mentions that besides his wife, nobody even knows he deals with this. That's not just emotional, it's practical. If you're trying to surf with friends and you have to bail because your stomach is suddenly in revolt, and you haven't told them why, it looks flaky. Or you push through and suffer silently, which is its own kind of exhausting.
There's a sports psychologist named Dr. Carla Edwards who's written about this — athletes with chronic gastrointestinal conditions. She talks about the "invisible illness" problem in athletic communities. If you have a visible injury, people understand. If you have a digestive condition, people either don't know or they think it's just a stomachache. The pressure to perform through it, to not make excuses, is intense. And the performance itself suffers in ways that are easy to misinterpret. If you're fatigued because you're not absorbing nutrients properly, a coach might think you're not training hard enough. If you're hesitant because you're worried about a flare-up, it looks like you've lost your nerve.
Finding other people who've navigated this — even if they're professional athletes you'll never meet — serves a specific psychological function. It validates that the struggle is real and that it's not a character flaw.
Let's go back to the extreme end for a moment. You mentioned the woman with no stomach, no colon, no gallbladder, running marathons. Are there other multi-organ cases that are well-documented?
There's a case in the medical literature. A man in Australia had his entire large intestine removed, his gallbladder removed, and a significant portion of his small intestine removed — all due to Crohn's disease complications over multiple surgeries. He took up distance cycling. Not competitively, but he's done multi-day tours, hundred-kilometer days. With short bowel syndrome, you're constantly fighting dehydration and malnutrition because you don't have enough intestinal surface area to absorb what you need. For him, cycling was actually helpful — the seated position and the rhythmic movement seemed to help with digestion and abdominal comfort in ways that running did not.
That's an interesting point. Different sports interact differently with digestive conditions. Surfing involves being horizontal on the board, the pop-up motion, the core engagement. That's a specific set of abdominal stresses. And cold water immersion shunts blood away from the gut. If your digestion is already compromised, that could be an additional challenge.
Lakey Peterson surfs in cold water. She's based in California, and she competes in places like Portugal and Hawaii where the water varies. There's a detail from one of her interviews that stuck with me. She said she learned she couldn't eat anything solid within three hours of paddling out. She could have liquids, specific ones she'd tested, but nothing solid. That's the kind of rule you only develop through trial and error, and it's completely individual. Three hours is a long window for an athlete burning calories at a high rate. She was essentially training and competing in a liquid-fueled state. That's not a protocol you'd find in any post-surgery handout.
Let's talk about the mental side more directly, because the prompt is really about inspiration and isolation as much as it's about physiology. What do we actually know about the psychology of returning to sport after organ loss?
There's not a huge literature specific to organ loss, but there's a related body of work on returning to sport after cancer surgery, which often involves organ removal. The consistent finding is that the psychological timeline is longer than the physical one. Physically, you might be cleared to exercise after six or eight weeks. Psychologically, trusting your body again can take a year or more.
That trust is not binary. It's incremental. You trust it for a thirty-minute session but not a two-hour one. You trust it on flat water but not in big surf. You rebuild the trust in layers.
There's a concept in sports psychology called "return to play confidence." It's been studied mostly in the context of ACL injuries and concussions, but I think it applies here. Confidence isn't just a feeling. It's built through a series of progressively challenging experiences where you expose yourself to the feared situation and nothing bad happens. Or something bad happens and you handle it, which is actually more powerful.
The "something bad happens and you handle it" version seems especially relevant for post-surgical digestive issues. Because bad days are going to happen. The confidence isn't "I'll never have a flare-up." It's "if I have a flare-up, I know how to manage it and I'll be okay." That's a more resilient kind of confidence.
Let me ask you something. All these stories — do any of them talk about a moment where they almost gave up?
Yeah, several of them do. Chris Klug has talked about the first year after his liver transplant being incredibly dark. He was on high-dose prednisone, which causes mood swings and weight gain and muscle wasting. He was a professional athlete who suddenly couldn't recognize his own body. He said there were months where he didn't believe he'd ever snowboard again, let alone compete. And then eighteen months later he's on an Olympic podium.
Which tells you that the low point is not predictive. The moment where you think "this is never going to work" is not a reliable forecast of what's actually possible. That might be the most important thing we say in this entire episode.
Josh Quigley, the cyclist, has said something similar. After his gallbladder surgery, he had a period where every time he tried to train, his digestion would revolt. He thought his endurance career was over. It took him months to find a nutrition protocol that worked, and even then, he said the first long ride where he didn't have issues felt like a miracle. But it wasn't a miracle. It was the cumulative result of all the failed experiments.
The miracle is just the part you see from outside. The food journal, the failed experiments, the bad days — that's the actual work. That's the honest version of inspiration. Not "this person is superhuman and did something impossible." But "this person did the tedious, frustrating, invisible work of figuring out their new body, and eventually it added up to something.
Let me pivot to something practical. If someone listening is in a situation like the prompt describes — seven years post-surgery, dealing with gastritis, wanting to get back to something like surfing — what would the actual steps look like, based on what we've learned from these athletes?
I think step one, based on every story we've discussed, is data collection before action. Before you try to surf again, you need to understand your current baseline. What are your trigger foods? What's your safe eating window before activity? What happens if you do core exercises on land? What's your hydration tolerance? You're building a user manual for your current body, not the body you had before surgery.
That's different from what most people do, which is just try the activity and see what happens. Because if you just try surfing and you have a bad experience, that reinforces the belief that you can't do it anymore. But if you've done the groundwork and you know your parameters, you can design the attempt to maximize the chance of success. Maybe you surf at a specific time of day relative to your last meal. Maybe you start with a shorter session than you'd like. Maybe you choose a spot with easy access to a bathroom, which is not glamorous but is practical.
I guarantee you Lakey Peterson knows exactly where every bathroom is at every competition venue. That's not weakness. That's professionalism.
Step two is progressive exposure. You don't go from zero to a three-hour surf session. You do a twenty-minute session in easy conditions. If that goes well, you do it again. Then thirty minutes. Then forty-five. You're rebuilding your trust in the activity and your body's trust in the activity simultaneously, collecting data the whole time.
Step three is building your medical team. Finding a gastroenterologist who understands athletic performance and is willing to work with you on optimization rather than just symptom management is hard. Most gastroenterologists are trained to treat disease, not to optimize performance. Their goal is "you're not in pain." Your goal is "I want to surf for three hours without issues." Those are different conversations.
You might need to be explicit about that. Walk in and say, "I understand I have a chronic condition, and I'm not expecting you to cure it. What I'm asking is whether you can help me figure out how to do this specific activity within the constraints of my condition." Some doctors will still not be helpful. But some will rise to that challenge.
If your gastroenterologist isn't helpful on the performance front, a sports nutritionist who has experience with gastrointestinal conditions might be more useful. That's who Lakey Peterson was working with. Not a gastroenterologist, but a nutritionist who understood athletic demands. The medical management and the performance optimization might come from different people.
Step four, and this might be the hardest one, is accepting that your relationship with the activity might look different than it used to. You might not surf the same breaks, the same duration, the same intensity. You might need more recovery time. You might have to be more strategic about when and how you do it. That's not failure. That's adaptation.
The prompt says "I really miss some things I used to enjoy, like surfing." And there's grief in that. It's worth naming that directly. Losing the ability to do something you love, in the way you used to do it, is a loss. You don't have to pretend it's not. The goal isn't necessarily to get back to exactly how it was. The goal is to find a version of it that works in your current body.
Let me mention one more example. There's a man named Steve Wilson. He donated a kidney to his brother in two thousand eight. After recovering, he took up marathon running. He's since run over fifty marathons, including Boston multiple times. He's also done ultramarathons. And what's interesting is that he wasn't a runner before the donation. He started after, as a way of proving to himself and others that kidney donation doesn't mean giving up an active life. So he's not someone who was already an elite athlete and managed to stay one. He's someone who built athletic capacity from scratch with one kidney.
That's almost more relevant. The prompt isn't from a professional athlete trying to get back to the tour. It's from someone who used to be active and wants to be active again. Starting from a new baseline with a changed body. And Steve Wilson's story says that's possible. Not easy, not quick, but possible.
Let me put on my former pediatrician hat for a second. You've seen kids adapt to serious medical challenges. What's different about how kids handle this versus adults?
Kids don't have the "before" to compare to. An adult who loses their gallbladder at thirty has a clear memory of what digestion felt like before. Every post-surgical symptom is measured against that baseline. A kid who has a major surgery just adapts to their new normal because they don't have a firmly established old normal. The comparison is the thief of joy, literally, in the physiological sense.
I think one of the psychological challenges for adults in this situation is letting go of the "before" as the standard. Your post-surgical body isn't a worse version of your old body. It's a different system with different requirements. The more energy you spend comparing it to the old one, the less energy you have for learning how the new one works.
I want to add one more name to the list. There's a professional wrestler — WWE — named Angelo Dawkins, part of the tag team Street Profits. He had his gallbladder removed in twenty twenty-three, mid-career, and was back performing within weeks. Professional wrestling is explosive, high-impact, with a schedule that's brutal — multiple shows a week, travel, weird hours. The WWE schedule is notorious for being hard on digestion even for people with intact gallbladders. Late-night eating after shows, catering food of variable quality, time zone changes. He had to figure out how to manage all of that post-surgery while taking bumps and performing at a high level. Still active, still performing, still a tag team champion.
We've got a surfer, a cyclist, a snowboarder with a liver transplant, a baseball pitcher, a wrestler, a marathon runner with multiple organs removed, and several kidney donors who became endurance athletes. That's a pretty comprehensive answer to the prompt's question.
I think the pattern across all of them is clear. Nobody just bounced back. Everyone had to figure it out through trial and error. Everyone had bad days and setbacks. Everyone had to become more knowledgeable about their own physiology than they ever wanted to be. And everyone eventually found a version of their sport that worked.
The prompt also asked about people missing multiple organs doing seemingly impossible things. I think the marathon runner with no stomach, no colon, no gallbladder, and half a pancreas probably qualifies. And there's another case worth mentioning — a man named John Bell who had his entire stomach removed due to cancer and then ran the Boston Marathon. No stomach, twenty-six-point-two miles. He had to consume small amounts of liquid nutrition every fifteen to twenty minutes throughout the race because he had no reservoir to store food. He finished — not fast, over five hours — but for someone with no stomach, finishing a marathon is an extraordinary metabolic achievement.
I think that's a good place to land. Not on the most extreme example, but on the principle that finishing is the achievement. The time doesn't matter. The comparison to the old body doesn't matter. What matters is finding a way to do the thing.
I'd add one more thought, which is that the prompt mentions feeling isolated. I hope these stories help with that. There are people out there dealing with exactly this — post-surgical digestive issues, trying to stay active, figuring it out day by day. They're not always visible, because it's not a visible condition. But they exist, and some of them are doing remarkable things. And some of them are just doing normal things that feel remarkable to them. A twenty-minute surf session in easy conditions. A jog that doesn't end in discomfort. A meal that doesn't require planning. Those are victories too.
They absolutely are.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the 1910s, a preservationist in Equatorial Guinea named Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo — no relation to the later president — proposed that wooden carvings and masks could be preserved indefinitely by submerging them in fermented palm sap, a technique he called "anaerobic saccharification." He argued the sugar content would gradually replace the water in the wood cells, creating a crystalline structure resistant to decay. The method was briefly adopted by several colonial museums before being abandoned when curators discovered it attracted swarms of insects and turned the artifacts into sticky, termite-infested messes.
...right.
To wrap this up — the question wasn't just whether people have done impressive things after organ removal. It was whether those stories exist as a counterweight to isolation, as proof that adaptation is possible even when it doesn't feel possible. And I think the answer is yes, with the caveat that the inspiring part isn't the medal or the finish line. It's the food journal, the failed experiments, the slow rebuilding of trust in a body that changed without your permission.
If there's one thing to take away, it's that the low point is not predictive. The moment where you think this will never work is not a reliable forecast of what's actually possible. Every athlete we talked about had that moment, and every one of them eventually found their way through.
Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop for keeping this show running. This has been My Weird Prompts. Find us at myweirdprompts dot com, and if you got something out of this episode, leave us a review wherever you listen. It helps more than you'd think.
See you next time.
