Smack!

I got brought to my knees recently by an organ in my own body–no, not my heart.

My useless appendix.

Talk about a perfect storm. It’s March first at 10 AM, one day before my 81st birthday. Ed and I get our second shots of the Covid vaccine. Yay, right? Back home, normal day. Eye doc appointment at 3:50 PM, no problem. Unexpectedly, she decides, “Let’s go ahead and dilate those peepers and do a thorough exam.” I’ve been having some problems with blepharitis–look it up–and I’m a little frustrated, so I agree. At the end of the session, she spells it out for me: this is what you need to do to keep your eyes healthy–a regimen, if you will, and I’m okay with regimens. In theory, at least, not always so diligently in practice. So, I head home with those inserts in my sunglasses. It’s 6 PM, and I think I should eat, so I roast some cauliflower and eat it watching a session of . . . I don’t remember.

Sitting on the sofa, I start to feel bad. Tummy pain. Not what you’d expect, not what I should have expected, but I’m a classic vacillator. Ask anyone. A girlfriend sent me a little sign, “Wait, let me overthink this.” Yep. So, it must be that I’m going to have a reaction to the inoculation. Forty percent of the recipients do.

I go to bed. Gets worse.

Later in the night, I vomit. And then again, And then again. You get the picture. Roasted cauliflower, remember? Sorry.

Next morning, no more of that, but pain, my old friend is still with me. And gets worse. In the afternoon (lost track of real time) I tell Corey, my wise daughter, “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight with this pain.” And she says, “Mom, on a scale of 1-10, how bad is it?”

“A Nine?”

She drives me to the mini-ER, and they perform a CT scan and tell me I have a perforated appendix. Two friendly, burly EMT’s transport me by ambulance to the hospital ER where I hear them say I have a ruptured appendix. I don’t know if there’s a difference between perforated and ruptured, but . . .

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A man (of course) has come in ahead of me with gall bladder surgery, so he goes in first and maybe three hours later, with my daughter standing beside my gurney, they roll me in and take the dreaded thing out laparoscopically. My surgeon, Dr. Rose, cute guy, fit and buff, great personality, tells me on a scale of (here we go again) 1-10, my appendix was at an 8 in terms of mess. His cheerful assistant beams at me and says, “We share a birthday! I was born on March second, too!” She in 1990, me in 1940, but hey. Corey has stayed, of course. She monitors my transfer to a room, kisses me on the forehead and takes off. After midnight.

The fun continues. My roommate is a loud sigher. Also, she has an alarm on her bed that goes off when she gets up unassisted. So there’s that. She can’t weigh (when I finally saw her) fifty pounds, but she’s a force to be reckoned with, and the nurses are so very patient, but I can hear the frustration in their voices every time they come in. Seems she has to go potty every hour or so. She has her own little chair thing, and after she pees, they have to empty it in the ‘real’ bathroom, next to my bed, and then flush, The flush sounds like a freight train. So it goes.

I’m up walking at first light. Holding my tummy, carrying my pole with the I.V. drip walking up and down. No way in hell do I want to stay here another night. Cheerful guy with long dreads brings me my liquid breakfast, not that I’m hungry, and 75% of it goes back. The nurse, Brenda, God bless her, is new! First day on this floor, second day in the hospital. Late thirties, spry, fit, pixie cut–totally overwhelmed. It’s a fucking madhouse. Can I just say, we’ve overloaded our healthcare facilities to epic proportions? Everyone is masked, but there are TOO MANY PEOPLE in a small space, all hurrying, talking–desperate, I’m sure, to be done with their shifts, even as they begin them.

My daughter and my husband come to visit, around ten I think and I watch my daughter get the drift of the drama on the curtained side of my room as my roommate once again makes her wishes known to the beleaguered staff. Corey looks at me and we are in agreement. Not where she wants me to be. My family hangs out, we chat, they leave. Then I hear that I’m to be without a roommate. She’s being discharged. It takes forever to get her dressed. So many complaints, so many questions! Finally, she’s gone.

Then, guess what? A new roommate. An amputee, lovely light-skinned black woman named Vivian with the sweetest husband. He fills the room–must be at least 300 pounds, so kind and so solicitous of her. He has all the answers, and they should trust him because she’s pretty fuzzy on stuff. But, no, they run him out because they’re going to ask her if she’s safe and things like that. So he goes, promising to come back that night, but she puts the kibosh on that, telling him it’s too far, he needs to stay home, she’ll be fine. So he goes. I give him a thumbs up and tell him he’s doing great. He gives me a big mile.

Vivian’s medical history is alarming. If there’s a condition and a medication out there she doesn’t have, I’d be surprised.

My surgeon has said I can go, but I need to pas gas. Nurses repeat this mantra. No gas–not out of me, anyway. Floor doctor, gentle, calm demeanor, Latin with no accent, comes in. Sits down and says, “I’d really like to keep you for a full 24 hours so you can get 24 hours of I.V. drip of antibiotics. “You are in danger of infection,” he says in all earnestness, while not bothering to look at my arm, which is disconnected from absolutely anything because my poor nurse had to take it out since it was out of the vein and flowing a large bubble in my muscle in my right arm. I don’t want to tell on her; I’m sure she’s forgotten me, but I also cannot comply. I look at him and say, “I really want to go home.” He looks down then looks at the room and looks back up at my face and says, “OK.” Nothing from him about gas. I would have lied.

Since I have some time, Brenda decides she’ll try again to get me hooked up, but in spite of multiple tries, she cannot. (You should see my bruises.) She does the best she can, but in fairly short order, I’m bubbling again, and I get her to take it out. “Let me go, honey,” I say. I can see she hates to admit defeat, and in less stressful circumstances, I bet she could have taken care of me. But these are not those circumstances. This is a circus and I’m not willing to play the clown anymore.

I call my daughter-in-law Renee, who has volunteered to take me home, let her know we’re working on it, and within a couple of hours–maybe three–I’m in Discharge Another cheerful lady marvels yet again at how I don’t seem my age, and how she can’t believe I have so few prescription meds to take and so few life-threatening medical conditions–no dentures, hearing aids–almost unencumbered am I. Lucky me.

People everywhere. Sorry, but mostly fat people. I know I am also fat–thirty pounds could miraculously fall from my body and I might be a normal-sized person–but hundreds of pounds fat. Poor things. I’m not judging, I’m just distraught at what we, as a species have done to ourselves. We’re over fed, while in the meantime there are people starving. What is WRONG with this picture?

Renee is there with her sister and her mom in a big, black Navigator. She, too is aghast. “I feel like I’m coming to a club before Covid,” she says, referencing the crowd. Coming in, leaving. Whew. She takes me to the pharmacy to my meds and then home. She brought a birthday present and food. Hot chicken soup, some groceries from Fresh Market. I have a wonderful family.

This is Sunday. That started on, well, Monday, I guess. The surgery was Wednesday. I’m alive and happy to be so. I’m sore as hell and moving slowly. Surgery at my age is not nearly as easy as it is when I was younger. I worry about infection and doing something wrong to get me back there. I’m taking my meds, I’m taking laxatives and eating the right kind of food, I’m walking. And I’m sleeping.

I haven’t decided yet what lessons, besides the obvious, to draw from this major life experience. Count your blessings, maybe? Right now I’m grateful to live out in the country away from people and cars and where it’s quiet and my nearest neighbors are a few cows and my pets are glad I’m home and my husband’s world has re-aligned itself.