All appendicitises are not born or created equally, nor do people respond to it the same way. That was something I learned and realized since coming down with it myself. Because while surviving my encounter, I still managed to pull one hell of a jackpot when it came to my appendicitis.
And not the good kind of jackpot either.
We've all done it when going through abdominal pain. Every time your stomach area hurts for longer than 10 minutes, you wonder if it is appendicitis, aka a worst case scenario. And then you wonder if it had already burst, and thoughts float in your head about having to go to the emergency room, having surgery, being in hospital. Hell, all of the above has occurred to me at least once a year.
And then five minutes later, the pain turns out to be gas.
They say all problems begin when things begin like any other day, and so it was for me in that it was a late shift at work that day, and me preparing for it. The only thing that was a little bit abnormal was that I was feeling some minor discomfort in my abdominal region. But in my mind, I didn't chalk it up to being abnormal because I was on my period and cramping for me is fairly normal as is some bloating. So I took some pain killers as I've been doing for the last three days and eventually forgot about it.
At least I did until I was about an hour into my shift. The pain by then had spiked unexpectedly and uncomfortably. But again I discounted it. I decided that maybe it's my cramps plus hunger that made it worse, given that I had not eaten much that day. So I bought a sandwich for dinner, popped another painkiller and went about my usual way.
However, this time, the pain didn't go away. And the longer I sat at my desk, the worse it was getting.
It was around 10PM that night. That was about when I really realized that the pain was no longer cramping but something else. Sitting was painful, with the pain from my stomach radiated throughout my body. I realized my heart was beating faster than it normally does for me and that my breathing was more rapid. And while there was no fever, but I was starting to feel a heavy feeling in my stomach, a feeling I usually only feel right before nausea and vomiting begins to set in.
And yes, I worried that it may be said worst case scenario. But at the same time, I dreaded the thought of going to an emergency room.
In most ERs, people coming in with an unexplained pain in the stomach region are the bane of doctors and nurses everywhere, not just because sometimes it's people overreacting and it's really nothing, but also because something could be wrong, but the pain could be caused by just about anything that happens to sit in that area, which outside of your heart, lungs and brain, is
every major organ in your body.
Half the time, they give you some painkillers, do some tests and then tell you they don't know what is wrong and send you home. But of course, not before making you wait an hour in the main waiting room, another two hours in the emergency waiting room, three more hours for a test and then another two to three hours for them to tell you nothing is wrong, essentially wasting your day on something you could have done from home: nothing.
The lower the priority they believe you to be, the longer they make you wait in lieu of "real emergencies." And people coming in with "stomach pain" are usually not something that would make a nurse or doctor to rush treatment.
As a person with a low tolerance for waiting around, I wasn't keen about the idea of going into a hospital for what could be nothing. And plus, after speaking to my healthcare professional younger sister about the issues, she advised against entering the emergency room until after 24 hours of constant pain due to general ambiguity of the symptoms.
So there's that.
The pain never did fade. In fact, it got worse. Finally at about midnight with my pain threshold nearly reached, my tolerance fading and, according to my co-workers, me looking sicker every moment, I went home early. I took a cab, mostly because I wasn't terribly keen on walking much or dealing with the rigours or the one hour it takes to ride public transport at that point.
Good thing too. Because almost as soon as I entered my home 20 minutes later, I vomited up pretty much a day's worth of food. And so began one of the longest nights of my life.
The pain I was feeling is really hard to describe, especially nearly a month after the fact. I've seen it compared to labour online, and have actually used that exact comparison myself to my mother. But it remains hard to quantify in general just because of how extreme it was. The pain was persistent and ever-present. It never faded, never went away and between that and the bloating, only ever got worse.
It was my ever present companion set to make you the most miserable human being on the planet. And nothing, no painkiller, hot water or even a bag of ice could make it go away.
I mean, I've broken a wrist, a full displacement no less. That pain barely exists compared to what I went through with appendicitis, mostly because the nerves went into shock and shut down in the broken region and all I initially had to deal with is the numb realization that "oh, I have a bone sticking up where it shouldn't so something must be wrong..." Even after the swelling set into the wrist, the pain was an inconvenience as opposed to something that made you wish you were dead.
It's 8AM, not quite 24 hours since initially noticing the pain, but barely past 12 hours of feeling it constantly. I've slept maybe three hours by then, mostly due to exhaustion and only in spurts, ran three hot baths, vomited twice more and contemplated if I had all my beneficiaries correctly set up in the event I die at least once. I knew I was dehydrated, but I could barely get through a sip of cold water before the nausea hit me.
I had enough of the suffering by then. Actually, I had enough of the suffering at about midnight but had at the time thought I could wait it out. And yet, even after a night of it not going away, I still was hesitant to go to an emergency room for fear of wasting my time.
But when I called up TransHealth and relayed the symptoms to them, they told me not to drink or eat anything and take thee straight to the nearest hospital emergency room pronto. Apparently that was all the external confirmation I needed. An hour later after painstakingly getting dressed and gathering some things, I was in a taxi riding to the hospital.
I can't lie to you. I still ended up waiting around a lot. Even though the pain was to a point where I couldn't even sit in the seats in the emergency waiting rooms and therefore had resorted to lying on the ground instead, which needless to say didn't really impress any nurse that saw me.
They drew blood after the initial hour-long wait and sent it to testing. But testing kind of takes time. Which meant I was on the floor of the emergency waiting room for some two hours or so before they moved me to a room of sorts to be examined by the doctor following the results of said test. Which amounted to him telling me my white blood cell count was extremely high and that I was being sent to ultrasound.
"Yep, it's likely appendicitis then," texted my sister after I told her what the blood test produced.
Great. I guess I am living out my worst case scenario, I thought, without realizing how much of a treat I was really in for.
At least the doctor had by then put me on fluids, morphine and gravol though, which helped everything from the pain, dehydration and nausea that was literally flooring me at that point. Well, it helped with the nausea and the dehydration. The pain was still there... though dulled enough where I could kind of sit in a chair.
Another hour and a half waiting for the ultrasound appointment then followed, in a chair this time, which did give me time to call my dad and tell him not to freak out (Note: he still ended up freaking out). Then the ultrasound where they spent most of their time jabbing their tools into the most painful region on my body despite the morphine. Then another hour long wait in the ultrasound waiting room for the results. Then another 45 minute wait in emergency for the doctor before I spoke with the doctor again at 4PM.
At this point, I've been in hospital for seven hours.
His verdict?
Possible appendicitis. They couldn't confirm it, mostly because they couldn't actually find my appendix in the ultrasound to confirm inflammation or what have you. But I must have checked off enough of the boxes for the diagnosis regardless because I was immediately put on antibiotics, given a hospital bed and put in for a surgical consultation that night.
Meanwhile, either the morphine wore off or something was going wrong because the pain came back twofold. In came more morphine, after the antibiotics anyway. And then it was back to more waiting.
At around 8PM the surgical team came to give me a choice: we can either confirm the appendicitis with a CT scan or just go straight into surgery with the possibility that it may not be appendicitis.
I went with whatever would get rid of the pain quicker: surgery. Because all a CT scan would do is make me wait until the next day if surgery is needed, and I had enough of waiting. By then my sister was there for support and to this day I was thankful for her presence because she handled all the paperwork for insurance, medical history, everything while I was curled up in the bed barely able to function outside of moaning and signing my name on some dotted lines.
Have you ever been asked to rate your pain on a scale of 1-10? For that entire day, I'd been rating it between a 7-9 when I was asked how bad the pain was.
At 9PM, I discovered what my 10 threshold felt like. And this was while I was on a mophine drip at the time. Basically I was done and so was my body. When they finally rolled me into surgery at 10PM that evening, I begged them to put me under right away so that I could escape the agony. Because at that point, 13 hours after I admitted myself, I almost preferred to have been dead.
In the words of my doctor's the next day, "Yep, it was appendicitis." Preceded by one of his residents pipping in that it was "half-gangrenous" when they found it. Which is something everyone loves to hear about when in a hospital bed in the morning.
As it turned out, "appendicitis" didn't even begin to describe how bad I was that day.
Yes, my appendix burst. My sister figures it had popped before I went into ultrasound due to the report stating they saw fluid movement in the area. Which meant it had popped less than 24 hours after I initially realized something wasn't right.
It was also a little more than 'half-gangrenous.' It was green, purple and fully dead when they found it with no amount of antibiotics able to save it from its fate. It was also so badly inflamed that that was the reason why the ultrasound couldn't find my appendix. According to my surgeon, it had swelled so large that they had mistaken it for a part of my bowels. Most appendixes swell to a size of about a centimetre when inflamed. Mine had ballooned to a size that was a bit larger than that.
As for the extreme amount of pain I was feeling leading up to surgery, apparently it was peritonitis. As it turned out, it wasn't enough that my appendix was rotting, inflamed and perforated that day. It went straight for the good stuff and angered the lining of my abdominal wall, to the point that my surgeon said that it was red and inflamed when they went in. Luckily, it was limited to around my appendix and did not spread, but to be honest, being told I had peritonitis freaked me out given that I had attributed it to an end stage thing that only happens
before you die.
Add in the three days post-operatively where I suffered from sepsis with a high fever, an elevated heart rate and non-functioning bowels as a result of surgery, leading to me being stuck in hospital for five days... Basically I had filled in pretty much all the squares in the appendicitis bingo card, minus having an abscess and, you know, death.
There are tonnes of appendicitis stories out there, and why wouldn't there be? Approximately one in 12 people will come down with it at some point in their life. But they aren't all made the same way, and everyone reacts and responds differently when suffering from it. Some catch it early enough that with antibiotics, they don't even need the surgery. Some people, like Ryan Callahan of the Tampa Bay Lightning, get to it early enough where the recovery time is relatively tiny due to the efficiency of laparoscopic surgery (which was the kind I got).
And there was me, the one who pulled one of the world's unluckiest cards by not only ending up with a ruptured appendix, but being hit with every major complication afterward.
