Like most big things, at first we all thought it was gas.
At 10PM on a Monday in the middle of December, I awoke to pain in my stomach — high up, in the valley of my ribcage. As a somewhat adventurous eater with a frequently fragile gastronomical constitution, this was only unusual in that the pain didn’t go away, no matter what array of degassing faux-yoga poses I pulled. By midnight, my pacing and moaning had woken Lauren; realizing that we would both be overly conservative in choosing the hospital option in such an unfamiliar situation, we woke our son and drove to the Stanford ER.
After answering the ebola questions, getting a pat-down from a friendly policeman, and seeing the nice triage nurse, everything immediately went pear-shaped. I remember pacing, pain increasing, feeling a cold sweat, seeing a lot of eyeballs, feeling my hands, arms, and legs start to buzz as Lauren asked for help, and seeing a nurse look at me strangely. In an instant, staff and syringes and pumps and monitors were all over me and people were exhorting me to keep talking while I started shaking violently. As they wheelchaired me away, Lauren staring blankly as a nurse grabbed her, I remember trying to make jokes and feeling a great calm because daaaaamn, coming to hospital turned out to be the right plan after all.
They told me it was a potassium deficiency and began pumping me with various types of K while wrapping me in warm blankets and running all sorts of tests. I wasn’t convinced, but soon forgot about it when I enquired after Lauren and got a worried look in return.
All was explained when she was wheeled in next to me on her own bed, a screaming Ethan in tow. She had fainted shortly after they had wheeled me off, triggering all sorts of concerns about communicable diseases, and a 40/20 blood pressure lead to instant hospitalization for her too, so we all got to spend time in the emergency ward together, one embarrassed and happy family.
Hours later, the pain wasn’t going away; I was still giving it a 5/10 (I would spend hours agonizing over the calibration and subjectivity of this number), and when poking, prodding, and ultrasounding didn’t unveil hidden lucky charms, they ordered a CT scan. My hospital-grade-painkiller-addled brain slowly filled with horror stories doctors and Facebook reshares had relayed over the years about healthy people being surprised by the we-were-scanning-for-something-else discovery of advanced and shortly fatal diseases.
So after a three-hour-long “twenty minute” wait for the results, I was consequently incredibly happy to discover that my appendix was rupturing — not only was I not about to die, but with modern laparoscopic techniques I’d be home later the same day, and our five-days-hence-and-non-refundable flight to Australia was definitely probably not in jeopardy.
I lay in a painkiller daze for the next eight hours while they waited for a surgical slot to open and hoped it didn’t rupture more. Lauren took Ethan to and from daycare, and the day slowly passed before I was finally wheeled off to a cold room and knocked out. Unlike the magnificent starfield warp you get with conscious sedation, general anesthesia was boring — “this isn’t doing anyth.. it’s tomorrow”.
Recovery consisted of having my catheter removed, curiously inspecting my three new holes and shaved manparts, and being told I could go home as soon as I peed under my own steam. At 5AM, after six hours of dreaming about waterfalls and orange Lamborghinis racing through glisteningly deep puddles, I finally managed it, and home I went.
Only then, once Lauren and I compared notes, did I start to realize that things hadn’t gone as smoothly as expected — my surgery lasted three hours instead of one because my appendix was hidden behind some of my other parts, and Lauren had had to wait outside with Ethan and little information for five hours — different nurses and doctors had told her different things about what all that poking around meant for the state of my insides. But right at that moment, all I cared about was kissing my family, hugging my bed, and whispering sweet nothings to my fridge of non-hospital food.
The bubbles
A day later, rather than chipperly going back to work as anticipated, I lay in bed in agony — it felt like a spider had taken a long and delicious bite out of my shoulder before giving it a good kicking with all eight legs. Dutifully following the discharge instructions, we called the hospital and got a reply three hours later — “you should probably come in”.
I was seen by a raft of doctors and nurses, and every one of them said something different about my condition and prognosis, from outright “why are you here” dismissal through to “you are in grave danger” and back again. Eventually, the messaging settled on:
- The pain was probably referred pain from bubbles left inside you after we inflated you; contrary to popular belief, you’re pretty porous so they should dissipate after a few days [we probably should’ve told you this would happen, sorry].
- The surgery may or may not have left some scarring; we need to x-ray.
- Please eat some food.
- Let’s have you stick around for a couple of hours and then you can go home.
Happy that I'd be able to leave so quickly, I got the scan, settled into a bed, and was told that what this actually meant was “you’re not allowed to eat anything and you have to stay overnight, surprise!”
At least armed with the knowledge that the pain was caused by bubbles and aided by a pillow, I did some more faux-yoga to send those bubbles away from my diaphragm, and off towards some other less-whiney part of my body.
Qantas
Three days later we took our yearly flight to Australia. A fifteen hour journey with an infant and a numbed husband not allowed to lift the slightest thing turned out to be not-so-terrible, at least for me, though there was one possibly-key moment where I reached for something on the ground and a small pain, deep in my gut appeared.
It didn’t go away the next day, nor the next night. Only at 6AM, with a small shift in my bowels, did relief come. I even had a videoconference with a colleague back in California where I remarked about the sudden change in pain levels and joked about how if we’d been meeting one hour earlier he’d have found me in tears.
An hour later, a week after my original troubles, I was in tears and hospital again.
The Alfred
It was impossible not to compare the American and Australian hospitals. The nurses were uniformly younger; there was no wifi; everyone was more cheery and less serious; the doctors went by their first names and had clearly seen Patch Adams a few times; there was no wifi; you didn’t get hourly diagnosis bingo; time estimates were remarkably accurate; also, there was no wifi.
Everything else was the same, just counterclockwise — long waits for scanning equipment to free up, temperature ranges all over the place, that pain rating system, and an underlying satisfaction with the choice to come to hospital in the first place.
The optimistic diagnosis was that I just had some clotting, and that they could pull it out with a quick bit of keyhole surgery. The reality was that I was still wounded internally from all the tetris they had to do the first time, and they ended up having to slice open my belly, reach in with their hands, cut out the damaged part of my bowels, and stitch it all back together. I forget the exact name for the procedure, but even the nurses couldn't pronounce it, so let’s just call it a bowel-outery.
This was a bit more serious than the appendectomy and there were no promises of being able to go home quickly, so as soon as I was done with the recovery ward (and its most excellent give-me-morphine-now-omg-why-doesn’t-it-beep-anymore-did-I-use-too-much buttons) they moved me to a long term ward where I’d share a room with an elderly patient undergoing what seemed like months of radiotherapy. The battery of drugs they pumped into me meant that missed Christmas and don’t remember much from those first few days, though apparently Facebook does:
After a comparatively easy few days of painkillers, moaning, naps, and trying to figure out the exact timing of the nurses’ shifts, my apparently-unionized gastric system then decided it was going to shut down for the holidays and would send everything back via my face. That night I'd wake up every two hours colder, weaker, more nauseous and more miserable, heavingly revisiting earlier and earlier meals, until finally sometime in the morning I tasted the cool liquorice flavors of CT scan fluid from my admission and things seemed to calm down.
In response, they stopped me eating and drinking, and put a nasogastric tube in — it goes in your nose, down to your stomach, and lets them pump things out of you. In reality, having the tube put in is disgusting enough to cause a complete evacuation of all systems, as does having to watch and feel the tube and contained fluids move around every time you coughed, or sneezed, or bent over. The tube also lead to a clear bag, which, along with the bile bag and IV line, you have to carry around, swirling and swishing the multicolor ex-contents of your body for all to see and hear.
While pain was a blunt instrument easily numbed or meditated away; the nausea was the real awfulness — it was a threat, an unpredictable psychopath hovering, a finger in your gut, constantly whispering incomprehensible warnings. And when those threats were occasionally carried out in full, the tube meant that everything came out via your nose, through a straw. As gross as that sounds, it was technically an improvement.
After that, life was dominated by thirst — I wasn’t allowed to consume anything other than ice chips, and despite my dry mouth pleading, the nurses and doctors insisted I was getting enough fluids via IV. I lay awake at night, dreaming about having mocktail parties while my parched lips begged for something other than the minty paraffin wax moisturizer they provided.
Though hydration was mostly a comfort game, going a week without any calories let all the blood-sugar-is-important lessons of Willpower come crashing back. I lost 15lbs, I wept easily, I couldn’t make up my mind about anything, and I mostly just sat, staring blankly out the window, too tired to internet, too tired to say much of consequence to visitors, but not so tired that I could sleep it all away. I was beat, and quietly holding Lauren’s hand while basking in her kindness and reading the nice comments being sent my way from friends was all I could manage, and all I really wanted. Though some people may say flying to Australia so soon after surgery was a mistake, I’m very glad I got sick in the same country as Ethan’s grandparents, who helped look after him while Lauren looked after me.
Two anguished days later, about six days after surgery, as my gastric strike seemed to calm down, they took the tube out and let me drink something. The apple juice that Lauren had sourced to my exacting and dreamed-up specifications (had to be clear, had to have a pop-top) rolled around my tongue like a rich, thick, golden and radiant syrup; it was incredible. Then I spoiled it by attempting to make a virgin appletini from hospital lemon cordial and apple juice, which lead to four hours of over-scented bathroom-cleaner mouth.
The moment they told me I could drink some apple juice, just before they removed the nasogastric tube. Pure joy.
A day later I was allowed to eat; the hospital food had too many painful memories associated with it, so Lauren made me a ham and lettuce sandwich, with (by request) extra soft Baker’s Delight White Flour Loaf. Fighting the nausea and chewing for the first time was both a revelation of flavor and oral proprioception, like a sudden flash of drunken dancefloor self-awareness — it felt like you’re going through absurd motions that don’t actually seem to make any sense, except everyone else seems to do it this way so why not carry on?
Home
A week later, out of hospital, recovery is still slow; non-refundable flights had to be lost, the pain and tiredness are slowly getting better, but the worst part is that I’m not allowed to lift son-sized objects for six weeks, which is an inconvenience, since I’m the person who gets him up, does the morning routine, and takes him to and from daycare. Also, doing it myself is the only way I can get a hug out of a young man who has just discovered “no”.
But I’m still blown away that all that stuff could happen to my insides, and I could end up OK. And I did learn one incredibly valuable lesson that I hope you learn too — when in pain and doubt, go to hospital.
