A Fortunate Self-Diagnosis

Reader's Digest version: Amy was tired. I got appendicitis. They put three holes in my stomach. They gave me jello. I am feeling a lot better. Amy danced. We are both sleeping again.

Thursday capped off a crazy week for me and Amy. She had been hard at work preparing for her folk dance performances of Christmas Around the World and pulled an all-nighter to finish a paper, beyond studying for tests in other classes and practicing with her tap dance group. I was doing what I could to help her have time to sleep.

My semester load has been easier, but this week I have been writing a few papers as well, and putting in a lot of hours at work helping with the newspaper’s Christmas contest. On Thursday I worked from 8 to 3, went to class until 5:30, then attended a service project with Beta Alpha Psi (accounting club) until 9.

Sometime during the evening my stomach started to hurt, presumably because I hadn’t eaten dinner. By the time Amy got home from dance rehearsal, the pain was still there, and I couldn’t sleep. The burning, concentrated aching behind my belly button felt pretty abnormal so I went online to check symptoms, thinking it could be either an ulcer or maybe food poisoning.

I wasn’t in any great pain, but I felt like I needed to get it checked out sooner than later. Hesitantly, I woke up Amy just after 1 AM and asked her to take me over to the emergency room, for lack of any other options. It was a hard decision, because I definitely didn’t feel sick enough to be going to the hospital.

Checking in at the emergency room, I felt even sillier telling them that I thought I might have appendicitis, considering the pain wasn’t localized on the right side of my abdomen like it normally would be. The doctor seemed skeptical as well, but decided to do a CAT scan to be sure. Things only started to feel serious when they put in my IV and I went unconscious for a few seconds and started to get nauseous.

We waited awhile for the CAT scan results, and I fully expected to hear that it was nothing but indigestion. But the doctor confirmed that I had a few stones obstructing my appendix and that it needed to come out. Because we caught it early, non-invasive laparoscopic surgery, where they make three small incisions under the navel, was still an option. We would just have to wait a few hours for the surgeon.

They moved me up to my own room on the sixth floor, where Amy waited with me until I went in for surgery just after 7. I don’t remember anything except moving onto an operating table, breathing on an oxygen mask, then waking up some time later shaking really bad. I guess when they removed my appendix, it was more inflamed than they initially thought. They moved me back upstairs to spend the day recuperating.

Amy was still able to make it to most of her classes on Friday, and she came to visit me after the surgery and just before her show that night. I was able to start eating liquids and soft foods right away, and I haven’t felt nauseous at all afterwards. Surprisingly, walking around relieves a lot of abdominal pressure and I am already feeling great, even without a lot of pain medication. I went to Amy’s Christmas Around the World performance last night—she did awesome and I was able to enjoy the show without too much discomfort. We are lucky to have identified the problem before it ruptured, and it actually came at a pretty fortunate time, instead of during finals or the holidays. Amy is now catching up on her sleep!