The Dumbledore of CMC

A surgery resident wrote a series of children’s books and created a special kind of medical magic

- JEN TOTA McGIVNEY

MAC KONITZER had always been a healthy kid. No hospital visits, no injuries, no big sicknesses.

But at 17, Mac’s appendix ruptured. As an athlete, he figured he’d just torn a muscle, so he lived with the pain for several days last November, even taking the SAT. When the pain grew more severe, his mom, Laura, took him to the emergency department, where doctors diagnosed sepsis—a life-threatening condition.

“Mac’s never been sick. This was our first hospital experience,” Laura says. “I felt helpless.”

Dr. Maria Baimas-George, a third year resident in the General Surgery Department at Atrium Health Carolinas Medical Center, spent time with the family to explain the situation and prepare them for Mac’s next steps. She offered them a book on appendicitis as a resource.

It wasn’t a typical medical book. Ruptured Appendicitis: My Worm Exploded! is about a girl whose day gets rudely interrupted by a worm in her stomach. Usually the worm—a piece of intestine, actually—doesn’t do much (“It usually lives a very boring life like a cat. It has no job.”), but sometimes it gets blocked. That’s when the worm gets angry and red and wages war. (Here, the worm wields an axe and mace.) Sometimes it explodes. Using the worm analogy, the story explains the cause of appendicitis, the surgery to fix it, and what recovery feels like. At the end are sections on “Doctor Words” (glossary of terms) and “After Surgery” (what to expect when).

“It lessened the stress,” Mac says. “When I started to read the book, it helped me understand what was going on. The pictures, especially. I didn’t even know what an appendix looked like at first.”