On the commute home, I caught the tail-end of a story about a 19th Century woman who learned she had breast cancer and performed her own mastectomy. According to the DJ, she survived the operation and lived many more decades after that.
The story sounded bogus to me — for one thing, I can’t imagine how she could deal with the blood loss — so I decided to see what I could find out about people who have operated on themselves.
Considerable gore below the fold. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.