I will refrain from sharing the unflattering pictures that stem from a trip to the ER, and instead share the above image from a season 9 moment from The Office when Dwight had his Appendix removed and immediately returned to his meeting.
Real life doesn't work out that way. My wife was complaining of stomach pains Sunday evening. She has stomach issues regularly, so we didn't think a whole lot of it. She took some Tums and went to bed.
Well, that wasn't the end of it. She woke up around 1am and the pain was significantly worse. She tried to go back to sleep, but wasn't able to. Our Insurance covers virtual visits 24/7 so about 2am we logged in to the insurance and got her on the video chat with a doctor. The Doc had her push around her stomach in a couple of places after describing her symptoms.
The doctor told her he could not rule out Appendicitis, so he recommended her make the trip to the ER. She went back and forth about it for a little bit. You don't want to make a trip to the ER just to end up having a bad gas bubble, or something else minor. But eventually she decides she needed to go. We live 7 minutes from the Hospital, so she decided to drive herself in. Our son was fast asleep and we didn't want to wake him up and have him freak out when he could not find anyone, and the ER won't let anyone other than the patient inside.
She arrived at the Emergency Room, got some blood work and a CT scan, and after waiting awhile was told that she did indeed have Appendicitis. She was admitted to the hospital and taken to a room and put on pain meds. They originally said she would have surgery about 7am.
Well, 7am came and went, and then they said her surgery would be at 3:30pm. They had her on pain medicine, so she was doing okay, but wasn't getting a lot of sleep. They got her ready for her surgery and finally at about 4:50pm I got the call that the procedure had started. About 30 minutes later the surgeon called me to let me know that he was done and everything had gone well.
She had to spend a second night in the hospital for observation, and spent most of the day there as well before I was finally able to pick her up and bring her home at 6:30 this evening.
She's still on some pain medicines, and has three new scars to add to her collection, but she feels much better than she did on Sunday.
No one knows what the Appendix ever did. They assume it served a purpose once upon a time, but evolution has made it just an extra organ hanging there at the end of the colon. The only thing it does is get infected and have to come out in approximately one in twenty people over the course of their lives.
Has anyone else had their Appendix removed? How did it go for you? How was recovery? We are looking forward to a full and quick recovery so she can get back to normal life... which doesn't look much different than recovery life since we are dealing with COVID, but still....