User blog comment:Loudmouth1/What Happened To Mr. Santiago?/@comment-1784834-20190508003644

I know I'm bumping a really old post, but we now have a concrete, canonical answer as to Mr. Santiago's whereabouts:

He's neither dead nor divorced from Maria. He's very much alive, very much still a married man, and the reason we don't see him is because he is working abroad in Peru as a doctor.

So there you have it. All those dark theories are false.

And a thought just occurred to me: Mr. (or should we say Dr.) Santiago wasn't having appendix surgery. He was PERFORMING it.