The week after I turned sixteen my life got turned upside down by the kind of mistake that would make a good comedy movie.

Several months before, I got hit by a car while biking across town to see a movie with my friends. I don’t actually remember anything about the accident or for a couple of days before or after. Someone ran a stop light and hit me inside the crosswalk. I'd gotten off the bike to walk it across, they told me later.

I woke up in the hospital with a concussion, a broken right arm, a cracked left femur, cuts and contusions all over and some heavy bruising around my hips. I went home in a wheelchair. It took a while for the leg to heal but I was back walking soon. Things seemed okay until I started having other problems.

The doctors decided that I had a hernia that needed surgical repair so I checked into the hospital in the middle of the summer before my junior year in high school for a minor operation.

My name was Martin Gordon Lewis and honest, no one had noticed the stupid name thing, it was just my name. Most everyone called me Marty, anyway. Marty Lewis. No one called me Lulu, yet.

I didn't know it but someone with almost the same name as me also checked into the hospital less than fifteen minutes after I did. Louis Martá­n Gordon danced in an all-boy drag revue under the name Lulu Martine but the hospital had insisted on using his real name. Except, they got it wrong and so before the day was over the hospital had two people registered as Martin Gordon Lewis in the same surgical wing, rooms 324 and 342, just around the corner of one of those twisty hospital corridors from each other.

Add to the fact that both of us stood about five-nine, weighed around 130 pounds, had light brown shaggy hair and eyes that were either gray or blue–I called mine gray but he called his blue -– Louis and Martin could almost be twins and could easily pass for brothers, or siblings anyway. Louis was seven years older but we were superficially nearly identical.

Except one of us had a routine hernia repair scheduled, said hernia caused by traumatic injury and covered under insurance, and the other person was scheduled for a complete sex change operation paid for by a wealthy admirer. Other than minor facts like that, you can understand the hospital's confusion.

One of us died on the operating table, victim of a previously undiagnosed cerebral aneurysm, and the other woke up in room 342, the survivor of a highly successful sex change. I know which one I am, but I'm still not always sure of which one I would prefer to be.

As mistakes go this one was, pardon the expression, a lulu. And so was I.