2010, the year of the exploding appendix. a story of optimism.
The first Friday of the year, and I woke up early. It wasn’t quite light yet, and although I couldn’t see much in the dim light provided by the red power button on the TV outside of the outline of my dog quietly breathing, I was already sure that something was wrong. I was shaking and sweating. There was an odd twinge of pain in my lower right side. It didn’t take long for my fever wracked brain to figure out what this meant.
At this point, although M. and I were separated, we still lived in the same house. I waited in bed until I heard her getting ready for work, knocked on the door to what used to be our bedroom, and asked her to take me to the E.R. We might have been walking around in the thick fog of the end of our marriage, but she still knew me better than anyone; and it only took one look at my face for her to know that I wasn’t just being a petulant child and really, seriously, needed some help. She quickly got dressed, called her boss to say she would be late, and trip #1 one to St. Mary’s began.
There was a moment on that drive when the distance between M. and I receded a bit, and it felt something like it had in the past. Worry was on her face like a bas-relief. I was hunched over in pain but trying to crack jokes to keep both of our spirits up. An island of fresh air in the middle of a lake of sulphur.
Trip #1: waiting room, paperwork, nurses, I.V., drugs, doctor, CAT scan, doctor again, explanation, admitted, surgery to remove the little fucker, recovery, fitful sleep, doctor again, home on Saturday. Tucked away in all of this tedium was a single, glossy piece of reality that was going to return, with theatrical-vengeance style, to corner my health in an abandoned train yard…. It seems the little fucker had sprung a leak, and had been seeping its vitriolic humor into my insides for days….
Monday morning woke me up like a bridge collapsing during rush hour. I didn’t have a fever, yet, but my stomach was distended like I had eaten the stuffing from my mattress pad, and the taste in my mouth made me look at my window to see if I had left it open for a neighbor cat to sneak in and take a shit there. The nausea had taken up permanent residence. I made it to the bathroom in time to throw up a pint of pit viper poison that was going to turn out to be just a little bit of foreshadowing. This time, when M. woke up, she wasn’t in the same accommodating mood as three days before. She was going to head into work, and said I should just call my surgeon so he could reassure me that this was a normal part of recovery. I left a message… the universe did take enough pity on me that I didn’t get a call back until M. made it the 25 miles to work. I gave a quick rundown of my symptoms and was told to get to the E.R. as quickly as possible. M. was not too happy about being my ambulance.
Trip #2: waiting room, paperwork, nurses, I.V., drugs, doctor, CAT scan, doctor again, explanation, admitted…. but how do you remove the little fucker again? Nothing to remove… just an infection and a bowel obstruction.
How does one describe this kind of pain? The cliche is: like being stabbed with a white-hot poker. Not good enough. More like a steroid-swollen, disgruntled mine worker with a grudge, a white-hot pick axe, and the good sense to slam it into my stomach repeatedly– just to make sure.
The days all bled into each other. Day or night, I stared at the TV (the Simpson’s Movie and Spiderman were perpetually on FX). About every 30 minutes, armageddon occurred in my guts, only without a hint of rapture or salvation, and drove me to climb out of bed and stumble over to the bathroom as more poison spewed out of me. I didn’t sleep or eat for the first four days. I lost 20 pounds in that same period. My left arm started to look like I was being assimilated by the borg. On the advice of my nurses, I forced myself out of bed several times a day and reluctantly lapped around my hospital floor, using my I.V. stand as a cane/crutch/walker/mobile pharmacy.
My friends B. and R. came to visit me a few evenings, and I could trace the descending arc of my health just by their expressions when they walked into the room. Dilaudid and I became fast friends. In a final attempt to stave off more surgery, I was given an NG tube. I don’t think there is a way to convey the feeling of having an only slightly flexible tube the size of a pencil inserted up your nose and down into your stomach when you have a deviated septum and an eyeball that is held in place with titanium pins.
I didn’t yet know it, but M. had already left behind our the promises of our marriage. I’m not sure why she did it, but she stopped by every day, at least once, to check on me. It was a final act of kindness before the phone call of mass destruction, and I will always be grateful for it.
On Friday, my dad flew in from Illinois. On Saturday, I started to finally feel better. I was able to pace my laps around the floor without having to lean so heavily on my I.V. stand. I ate. I finally noticed that S., one of the nursing assistants, was painfully beautiful even in scrubs, and my dad and I would follow her around the floor with a complete lack of subtlety. Like the hint of my returning health, she was there in front of me, leading me around and around that sterile hospital floor while I considered the relative merits of asking someone who had wiped vomit off of my chin and been in the bubble of my unwashed body out on a date.
On Monday, I made it home. Dad stayed for a few days as I began the five month process of putting the weight back on and getting my strength back.
The moral of the story? No matter how bad it hurts or how hard it is to continue, don’t give up. You never know when you’re going to get to chase a pretty nursing assistant around the hospital with your ass hanging out of your gown.
