I didn't even know he was sick.

Get well man!

ouch! poor man. hope you are feeling better. get well soon!

Which appendix?

ouch.

NDRU, get well soon, I hope you are ok

I didn't know he had one. Poor sausage. Get well.

Get well soon.

Oh no! Hope he's all well and good soon.

get well right away.

Sticky.

Get well soon

ZombieKitten said:

He is home and might post tomorrow, very tired right now.

Thanks for keeping us updated !

Get well soon bestest friend !

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Get well soon!

Wishing NDRU a speedy recovery until then, lots of rest and percoset!

man i can't imagine how much that hurts.

Get better friend

Thank you so much for the well wishes! I really appreciate it! It was a truly hellish week. I am feeling a LOT better, but still not eating much, moving like a 90 year old man, and sleeping half of the day. But I am on my feet and eating and, hell, alive

On Monday I had lunch with my mom, and immediately afterward started getting a stomach ache. I thought it was indigestion or something bad that I ate. By about 6 pm it had not gotten better, so I lay down, still thinking it was food, but that maybe I'd gotten an infection (since I was not nauseous, really), just kind of hurting all over my stomach.

I'm going to break this story up into pieces, becasuse since the "upgrades" to the site, my paragraphs are all mashed together and everything I post looks like Henry Miller book...

[Edited 5/11/13 22:08pm]

I was up all night, and the pain got pretty extreme, so I called the doctor. By the time I got to the doctor the pain was reaching an unbearable stage, and she was pretty sure it was not something I ate. She sent me to the emergency room (made me walk; they really might have put me in a wheelchair at that point! But anyway...) and the guy at the ER took about 30 seconds to guess "appendix."

Of course they kept tapping my stomach asking "does this hurt?" and then another doctor would come by and do the same. They had me walk here and there to sign in and fill in some forms but not too many (I do have some fresh opinions about how to improve our hospital systems!)

By that point I got a shot of morphine (which actually only dulled the pain) and felt pretty certain that I was not going anywhere for a while. The surgery would be that night (Tuesday) if the cat scan confirmed. It did, and it also said it had ruptured which is quite a bit more serious. They said the rupture normally would not have happened so quickly, and did I have a high threshold for pain? I said I'm sure I do, and winked, and that pretty clearly made my male doctor uncomfortable.

I had to pee, and the nurse had me stand and try to remove my clothes while I was at it, at which point the pain returned with a vengeance. They had been asking how much it hurt on a scale of 1-10. I figured getting shot in the stomach several times or shattered bones or possibly childbirth hurts worse, so I had been saying 8. But when I stood, and the nurse came back to find me clutching the gurney with my eyes wide and teeth clenched, she said she just wrote 10 in the chart for me. She returned with dilaudid, which she said was 10 times stronger than morphine. It definitely did the trick, but even then moving over bumps on the gurney was uncomfortable. The human capacity for pain is astounding.

[Edited 5/11/13 22:49pm]

I went in for surgery, leaving a few messages for my family so they knew where I was. They gave me the gas, and what seemed like seconds later, I woke to some chaos of a bunch of doctors talking loudly and moving and me all about and with a mask on my face (which makes me uncomfortable). Someone told me to go back to sleep, but I was feeling very panicky and confused. Anyway, I was in recovery at that point, and finally they took the oxygen off me and I felt like I could relax a little. It felt like it was over, and it was over in terms of the cutting, but it was only the beginning (sorry if you're already bored) of the awful time spent in the hospital. That proved to be maybe just as bad as the pain.

[Edited 5/11/13 22:25pm]

Fortunately for you all, I can't finish this story tonight, but the short version is that, while this week was one of the worst of my life, I know people have it much worse. I left the hospital with a powerful compassion for those who have to spend months at a time there rather than days.

Oh, and does anyone know what the hidden healing powers of Jell-o are? They practically force that shit down your throat at the fucking hospital! I thought if I did not eat it they would hook some up to my IV