Patients are Liars

During a history-taking session with a 35 year-old male patient today, I asked him the routine question about his previous operations.
"None", he stated firmly. I am curious.
"Are you sure?" I reiterate. He looks at me like I'm calling him stupid.
"Yes. Positive." I finally decide to show my hand.
"Only I've looked through your notes and they say you had a kidney transplant in 2005".
He is nonplussed- "oh, does that count as an operation?".

This is typical. Medical people don't expect their patients to know much about their problems, or remember the finer points of their treatment for later, but we have to draw the line somewhere. Strangely enough, putting somebody to sleep, cutting a big hole in their side, tearing out a vital organ and stitching in somebody else's counts as an operation. It's crazy, I know.
I've had worse though. I once chatted to a man who swore blind that his lungs were working fine, never any problems there. He only had one, the other had been whipped out last week for his apparently minimally irritating lung cancer.

"What about allergies, to any drugs or foods?" I continue on down the path of foolish questions.
"Oh, no, definitely not. I'd remember that."

Well guess again jackass. Your notes say you're allergic to all kinds of penicillins, and the most common way to find that out is to have them given to you and watch as you blow up like a anaphylatic hot air balloon and almost die from airway obstruction. But I guess it's easy to forget, you know, that time you nearly died.

So, my conclusion is that some patients are extremely forgetful, plain stupid, or my own personal theory, they are playing games with me and creating a whole new character every time somebody with an ID badge speaks to them.
Anyway, my patient has asked me to kindly tell the surgeons during the operation tomorrow that it is his right testis that is cancerous and needs removing, not his left. Well now, how good is my memory?