But before Smith and her family had even packed their snow pants, she realized she didn't feel good. "I woke up feeling just a little bit nauseous, and I wasn't sure why. Throughout the course of the day, I started to feel worse and worse and started to develop pain in the abdomen," she says. By about midafternoon, her father took her to urgent care. She ended up getting emergency surgery to have her appendix out. Smith still has a small scar from the appendectomy. And after the surgery, she found herself intrigued by the part of her body she had so suddenly lost. "It inspired me to wonder: Why do we have this weird little organ in the first place? What does it do? Why does it get inflamed?"