7 Lessons Learned From My Good-For-Nothing, Rotten Appendix
After spending a full 7 days in the hospital I can firmly say that I feel like a different person. I may be only physically missing my appendix, but I also feel like a week of my life was sliced away along with it, and trying to play catch up is overwhelming to say the least. Complications post-operation kept me there longer than anyone would have liked, and it gave me a lot of time to soak in my first real hospital experience. It was a bit jarring to go from having never suffered any serious ailment to suddenly requiring an emergency surgery that rendered me mostly useless for a week. That being said, laying in bed with out anything in the world to do besides “heal” offers a lot of opportunity to observe the world around you and think about the one you’ve been walking around in, and stew over some things.
Here are 7 things the removal of my good for nothing, rotten appendix taught me in the 7 days it landed me in my personal version of a pale beige-colored hell:
1. Listen to Your Body
I was suffering abdominal pains, bloating, fatigue, and a myriad of other symptoms from having an infected organ for 3 entire weeks before I was rolled into an ER. I kept convincing myself that it was just a bug, or general digestive issues, or something less serious that could be solved by excessive amounts of coconut water and ginger root in literally everything. It turns out though, no amount of either can mend a dying organ, and the longer you let it hang out in your body the easier it gets for it to do some serious damage. I think I knew, deep down in my gut (pun intended) that something was wrong, but as a fairly healthy eating, active, young person I naively figured it would fix itself because I didn’t have time to deal with anything more serious. Being informed that if I had waited any longer, my appendix could have very well taken the rest of me down with it was really a slap in the face. We only have these bodies, and we’re only going to get to do the things we want to do if we listen to them when they ask us for help sometimes.
2. Being a Nurse is Really Hard
Some individuals accept the challenge of being a nurse willfully, do a kick-ass job at making people feel better, and deserve a constant round of applause. Others maybe need a little more practice, or at least time on their hands to get to their patients. There were some staff at Memorial who really helped me heal, encouraged me and kept me in the loop, really tried to connect with me and opened my eyes to what it’s like to work in a hospital. It’s an incredibly complex, emotional, fast-paced network of constantly evolving relationships and circumstances that requires a great deal of personal attachment to navigate with any grace at all. Ideally, every nurse would have the time and patience to connect and understand each and every patient, but there’s just no humanly possible way to make that happen, unless cloning and time travel are actually realized in the near future (in which case, the necessity for good nurses would probably go down with the number of people who no longer need them because they’re busy playing cards with themselves in ancient Greece.) Even if a nurse doesn’t meet your every expectation, they deserve your every gratitude for trying to help you when they’ve got about a million other things to do, people to take care of, and (surprise!) an entire life of their own outside the hospital.
3. It’s OK to Let People Take Care of You
I’m a fairly independent young person. I buy and prepare almost everything I eat, I manage my supplies and finances, I do my own laundry, I floss (sometimes)… and it’s absolutely terrifying for me to let other people have more control than me over what food I’m eating, the clothes I’m wearing, and the time I’m sleeping. However, if you’re shivering your life force out and unable to lift your hand with a 104 degree fever for a day, it’s probably best you’re not the one that has to clothe, feed, and take care of yourself. It’s even ok to let people that love you go out of their way to try and make things better for you. My boyfriend has been incredible during this whole event in taking care of me in too many ways to list, but most importantly has dedicated all of his spare time to making sure I’m ok. No matter your level of independence, know it’s usually worth it to accept care from people who are giving it with love, and it’s ok to admit that you need it sometimes.
4. Exercise Acceptance
As an active person this whole event has been particularly frustrating for me. I know that rest is important, and there’s a lot of light activity I can do to on the road to full recovery to get back to my normal lifestyle, but I feel pretty antsy after basically not moving for most of a full week. I never really felt like working out or being active before was much of a luxury, it was something that I enjoyed doing that made me feel better and something I felt like I had to do to feel normal. Daily yoga, occasional running, strength training, and biking around town are all huge parts of my life that feel very strange to have to slowly move back into. After years of building up personal practice and investing in real running shoes, it really hurts to feel like I’m starting over slowly integrating activity back into my life. But feeling sorry for myself isn’t going to get be doing handstands anytime sooner, accepting where I am right now is the only thing that’s going to send me in the right direction, one slow step at a time.
5. The Whole Part is the Worst Part
You spend a lot of time waiting for something to happen in the hospital. There’s a sense that the world is moving outside and around you and even in the building, but you’re trapped in your room waiting for someone from the real world to come fill you in on what you’re missing out on. Depending on your pain level and technical status, it’s easy to spend the day feeling either constantly bothered and worked on or completely ignored. The first couple of days I spent there made the nights feel comparably worse- sleep was impossible after being constantly monitored and having blood drawn at 3am just for good measure… but the less serious my fever got, and the more I started to heal and develop other less serious post-op symptoms, the less friendly and attentive the day staff became as I was less of a waking priority, and the more welcoming the night staff became by simply trying to get me in comfortable positions while they poked and prodded me through out the early hours of the morning. The truth is there were great and not-so-great nurses during the days and the nights, during the whole experience, and there were times where I really felt less than ideal. But it’s important to note that while the whole part was the worst part for me, it’s not all about me and my experience. The staff getting to see someone get well enough to leave their care is probably one of the best parts of their job (again, nurses deserve some serious credit for the ridiculous job they undertake).
6. Being Outside is Important
The outdoors and I have always had a complicated relationship with my being whiter than mayonnaise and a little allergic to grass. But that’s never stopped me from enjoying the outdoors each and every day. For some reason I remember the world I was carrying around rotting appendix in as a lot less colorful than the one I’m in now. It wasn’t until my last day at the hospital that I realized something pretty disturbing: I hadn’t been outside (or even out of the observation wing I was staying in) in a full week. I’m currently writing this in the middle of the park on a pleasantly overcast day because the world is just too damn nice to miss out on after a week indoors. I don’t think I have ever in my life spent that much time inside, and it was slowly eroding at my psyche with out me even realizing it. It’s not going to help me catch up on the work I need to do after missing a week of classes, but I plan to spend as much as my time as possible outside in Savannah the rest of this Spring. Just knowing I can get up and walk out my front door to take a stroll outside of a hospital hallway is medicine enough to at least make me feel at peace while I work back up towards running and biking again.
7. Happiness Isn’t a Place, and You Can’t Try to Get There
Not to sound too much like a fortune cookie, but let me just tell you that “now and then it’s good to just pause in the pursuit of happiness and just be happy” (an actual fortune I carry around in my wallet). I feel like a large part of my hesitation in seeking medical help or advice when I initially started feeling bad stemmed from feeling “on track” or doing “well” by my own standards so much so that I desperately didn’t want something to ruin my progress on the pursuit. I don’t think I actually felt very happy the last couple months, but I felt like I was hot on the trail and didn’t want to let the scent go. The first few weeks of this academic quarter were especially uplifting besides being in physical pain for most of them — I had committed to a great internship opportunity this summer that I’m really excited for, my classes were going well, I had more time than usual to work on personal projects, catch up on reading, go to some of my favorite yoga classes, and was getting to cook meals I love with the boy I also love. This experience completely uprooted my life and where it was for a week, but I think the only way I’m going to start feeling normal again is knowing that feeling happy is something within and not something I can traverse to. It’s really not worth it to feel like we have to get through something in order to feel happy later, because that’s making happiness something tangible and unachievable.
My happiness is in me somewhere, I just have to let myself heal a little bit more and take myself on a few more walks before I can allow myself to add some more joy into my life. Good news is, even if I didn’t have room for more joy before this surgery, I know I do now since my triple-than-normal sized, infected, stupid appendix is out of the picture.
