Out, damned appendix!

Those who know me well know that I'm scornful of the appendix. I can't pass up telling the latest appendix jokes, and just last week I dubbed something "more useless than an extra appendix," which had the gents at the club tittering.

Well, my appendix got wind of this and said, "Oh yeah?" with a sneer. A sneer and a narrowing of its tiny, tiny eyes. On Monday it puffed itself up mightily, from the size of your little finger to the size of a ripe gherkin. Random shooting pains in my abdomen resulted. I ignored its threats, of course: what is the appendix but a notorious bluffer?

By Tuesday morning, though, it had switched from threats to violence: I could barely walk, and I had to do something about that appendix. Our car had broken down over the weekend, likely in cahoots with my appendix, so my friendly neighborhood rock star drove me to the emergency room. After a very brief stay among the fifty or so other people in the waiting room (abdominal pain is apparently a "get out of jail free" card), I went to wait among fewer people in a series of little curtained-off rooms. I believe I witnessed domestic violence, but things were starting to get a little fuzzy, so I'm not sure what exactly I saw.

Except sudden flashes of white light obscuring my vision! Was it a visit from the lord? No, it was phase three of my appendix's attack on my person. The worst betrayal is the one that comes from inside, dear readers. I got incredibly nauseous, I started to sweat like a Viking in a sauna, and apparently I started to moan loudly and rock back and forth. I know this because later, while I was being prepped for surgery, someone said "he started to moan loudly and rock back and forth." It was at that point that I discovered that sweating buckets, moaning loudly, and rocking back and forth is like a "get out of jail free" card in the room that's just past the waiting room.

Much of the rest of Tuesday is blurry. A thousand people approached me, asking me the same questions, and I wondered (aloud?) why the first person didn't just write my answers down someplace where the other people could consult it. Perhaps they were trying to catch me in a lie? Perhaps I looked like the kind of guy who would fake his way into an appendectomy? Does Crash touch on the subject at all? (Not that Crash.)

So at some point a handsome guy who might have been on E.R. at some point (the surgeons really do look like that, apparently) introduced himself

(More later. I need to go back to bed. I just got home from the hospital a few hours ago, and the Vicodin has me a little off-kilter.)

as the surgeon. His name was Dr. Angelus, which I took to be either a good sign or a bad sign. Are we talking Angelus, as in Season Two of Buffy's Angelus? Yikes. Or are we talking angelic, but in a "we're here to help you, my son" kind of way, instead of in a "we're your escort to the next plane of existence" kind of way? Before I could figure this out, I woke up in a standard-issue hospital room.

Things that are alleged to have happened in the interim: I told the anesthesiologist that she was pretty, I had surgery to remove my appendix, I called for my favorite art historian from the recovery room, she came and we had a chat during which I told her about the pretty anesthesiologist and the sweating/moaning episode in the inner emergency room, and they moved me to the regular hospital bed that was to be my home for the next couple of days. I'm reasonably certain that these things happened, but because I wasn't there to witness them, I can admit them only as hearsay.

The room was nice, as far as hospital rooms go. The bed was too short for me, so my feet were always jammed against the end. Because vicious thugs stabbed me in the gut, it hurt to sit up or lie down or exist, but kindly nurses kept adding things to my IV that made things not so bad. The worst part was the nights: they wake you up every two hours to take your blood pressure, which I found extremely annoying. Aren't you in the hospital to recover? And isn't sufficient rest necessary for recovery? When I complained to the nurse who insisted on calling me "baby" about the constant wakeups, she told me the story of a woman who insisted on being left alone from 9 pm to 9 am, who then died of a heart attack that might not have been fatal had she not insisted on being left alone.

This part of the story is boring, because being stuck in a hospital bed with one book and sixteen channels and a Vicodin haze is boring. On Wednesday I progressed rapidly from no food or liquid to clear liquids to solid food clear liquids to solid food, and I managed to stagger up and down the hall a few times while leaning on my IV cart. MFAH visited a couple times, and this morning I befriended my second roommate, who had had his prostate removed.

Then it was time to go home. I'll be stuck here, more or less in bed, for the next few days, so if you want to call and keep me company, please do. If I don't answer, I'm probably not out for a jog.