How to know if your appendix is bursting

Assplosions, boot-buying and 7 other subtle signs you might be having an appendicitis

Typically when someone is having an appendicitis, they collapse to the ground, scream and clutch their lower-right side. This is usually how things go in the movies.

However! For other people, such as yours truly, the signs can be a bit trickier to spot, especially when the symptoms mask themselves as other troubles you’re more familiar with. Things to watch out for include…

First it feels like you’re getting the flu. There’s the classic all-over body aches, high temperature, vomiting and assplosions. Horrible, but not really unusual. (Note: This is actually when your appendix ruptures.)

Then it feels like you’re getting your period. This can be especially confusing when you also happen to actually be on your period. This time it feels and looks just like every other month, only worse so. There may be a moment where you’re bleeding and shitting on the toilet while simultaneously throwing up in the sink, but that’s easily dismissed as the unlucky one-two punch of getting the flu plus your period at the exact same time. Nothing worth going to the ER for or anything. (Yep: Still rupturing.)

Then it feels like you’re getting better. Your temperature lowers back to normal, the cramps go away and the fiery liquids cease trying to erupt their way out of your body. Such sweet relief! (Turns out this is a strange but not altogether rare thing that your body can do: It walls off the infection, sealing it away from the rest of your organs with some kind of membrane (?!) which actually works surprisingly well, but isn’t a great long-term solution since behind the seal your appendix is slowly turning gangrenous.)

Then you go and buy a pair of ridiculous sky-high red boots. You feel good. Great even. All loose and impulsive, kind of like you imagine Goldie Hawn is on her best days.

Then you go to a Bettie Serveert show at Slims and order champagne. Two rounds!

Then you go back to work. People say you still look a little green, but that’s probably the lingering effects of the flu. Or the champagne hangover. Or the boots? I don’t know.

Then FIVE DAYS LATER your cat pounces on your lower gut and you notice some tenderness. You poke at it and prod at it and start to notice that it maybe feels a little hard in there. A cyst? Fibroid? Huh.

Then you take the bus to the doctor. Your favorite nurse practitioner is training someone new and the 3 of you make lots of jokes about lady parts and all the weird things they do to their owners. You laugh and laugh. After a full exam, she recommends you make an appointment for a sonogram so they can get a closer look at what’s what. But after calling around and discovering that no appointments are available, she suggests you might want to walk over to the ER on the other side of the building. (Note: This is when she saves your life.)

Then you walk yourself over to the ER. It’s crowded but nothing too crazy. You buy some Hostess cupcakes from the vending machine, open your book and settle in for a wait. But before you really even get started, they call your name. After asking a few questions and taking your temperature (now it’s 101), they’re all PUT DOWN THE CUPCAKES. In the ER, gut pain plus temperature equals maybe surgery, so just to be safe you need to keep your stomach unoccupied. They park you in a room, and there you wait for the next 9 hours.

At one point they inject you with a saline drip, but it misses where its supposed to go and your arm swells up like a melon and the needle falls out. You bend your arm and water squirts out like a clown’s lapel flower.

Finally late that night the CAT scan machine becomes available, and they make you drink a horrible drink and a handsome nurse wheels you to the elevator. The two of you flirt mildly. Then an ambulance drops off a drunk lady who wrecked her car and you get bumped from your spot at the front of the CAT line. The nurse parks your wheelchair in the hallway and while you wait, and you can hear the woman in there yelling and trying to punch people and generally being unreasonable.

Slowly it dawns on you that whatever horrible thing they made you drink is now sending urgent help-me signals from your ass region. You wave down the handsome nurse again and he wheels you to a bathroom and tells you to try and keep your IV bag aloft. While you’re busy taking care of your businesses, you notice that your IV has drooped and is now back-filling with blood.

Finally it’s your turn to get CATed. Handsome nurse inserts some kind of camera dildo into your junk (what? oh…hi) and the flirting comes to an abrupt end. He beams your scans to India where a doctor confirms there’s something grim going on along the lines of a dark mass in your abdomen, and they schedule your for surgery. The surgeon opens you up and discovers your ruptured appendix has become so rotten, it’s liquified. The smell, he reports later, is “not too good.”

Then you wake up screaming with a temperature of 105 as your body fights the infection your liquified appendix spread around inside you. You spend the next 5 days in the hospital, waiting for your bowels to return to life, farting being one of the most anticipated signs of recovery after an appendix removal. You finally manage to pass gas, only it’s accompanied by a mountain of shit—a 5-day pile up of cartoonish proportions that pretty much lifts you off the bed. Sheepishly you ring for the nurse.

“Well!” She says brightly, “It looks like somebody’s ready to go home!”