Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Appendicitis Gone Wild!!

For those of you who have heard through the grapevine and those of you that haven't...here is our latest news. On Thursday April 10th, I started having some pain in my lower right abdomen. I didn't want to rush to the ER, so I waited until Friday morning to see how I felt. When I woke up and the pain was still constant, I figured there was something really wrong. So, I went about our normal routine, got everyone ready, had naps, lunch, stopped at the park to visit a friend in town and then headed out to the ER. By the time I got there it was about 4:30 pm. After some blood tests and an ultra sound, the doctors determined it was appendicitis. When I finally got into surgery, it was about 9:30 pm. It was to be a fairly short surgery, so when I woke at about 1 am and was in some immense pain, I knew that things hadn't gone as planned. The nurse was trying to comfort me and tell me that they had to open me all the way up because they had found a mass inside. The next morning I learned that they had removed about a foot of my colon, the mass, my appendix and 4 inches of my small intestine. I was told they were treating it as cancer, but thought maybe it was crohn’s disease because of the way the colon looked. Five days later we got the pathology report back and found out that it was not cancer or crohn’s, but a severe case of appendicitis. The doctor said it must of been "smoldering" for some time and the mass they found was just infection from the appendix. What happened to me was pretty rare, most people have appendicitis come on within 24-48 hours. I don't know why I was elected the lucky one to have such a rare case. Why couldn't it be the lottery or something? So, because of appendicitis that had gone wild, I now get to sport a 12-inch scar down my abdomen. I also get to say that I have had a bowel resection at the young age of 32. With pre-eclampsia last year, a bowel resection this year, I wonder what next year has in store for me?