Many years ago, I had my appendix removed. It was supposed to be a simple procedure; I would be on the table for twenty minutes, wait another couple hours to wake up and recover from the anesthetic, then they would send me home.
Things did not go as smoothly as I was promised. In fact, I am quite fortunate to still be around to tell the harrowing tale.
This is the main reason that today I do not trust hospitals or doctors.
Or my parents.
Especially, my parents.
It all happened about twenty years ago when my wife and I still lived in San Jose, just a few houses away from my mom and dad. Yes, I lived in the same neighborhood as my parents. My wife and I moved there right before my oldest daughter, EM1, was born. We figured it would be a good idea to be close to family because they could help with the baby.
This was a mistake we corrected about a year later.
Anyway, back to my appendix.
I went to work that night, feeling absolutely fine. I worked the graveyard shift from 7 o’clock at night until 7 o’clock in the morning. The first few hours of the shift were quiet, and at about 10 o’clock I decided to get something to eat. I went to a local pizza shop and ordered a small pepperoni pizza.
Three hours after I ate, I was in the bathroom of the police department locker room, throwing up. I thought I had food poisoning, or that an employee at the restaurant had put something noxious on my pizza. Between bouts of vomiting and stomach cramps, I contemplated going back to the restaurant and fire-bombing the place. Fortunately for everyone involved, I was far too ill to act on any of my delirium-induced fantasies. I wasn’t going anywhere.
On a side note, if you have never had the pleasure of being on your hands and knees in a locker room bathroom, throwing up into a toilet that probably had not been properly cleaned in over a decade, I don’t recommend it.
My supervisor found me in the fetal position later that night and sent me home. As soon as I thought I could stand up without throwing up again, I took his advice. I drove home, crawled into bed, and fell asleep immediately.
I woke the next morning with sharp pains running through the lower right side of my stomach. It wasn’t food poisoning after all.
I woke up my wife and told her I needed to go to the hospital.
Because we had the new baby in the house, my wife called my parents and asked them to drive me to the emergency room to get checked out. They came over right away.
And by “right away,” I mean about an hour later. Apparently, driving the car 200 feet from their house to ours was quite an ordeal.
They hustled me into the car and headed for the hospital. I was in so much pain, I closed my eyes. Not because it made me feel better, but because if I threw up, I didn’t want to see the look of disappointment in my parents’ eyes when I ruined the upholstery of their car. A few minutes later, I felt the car pull to a stop, and my dad turned off the ignition.
I opened my eyes and asked if we were at the hospital already. Instead of a big, red-and-white emergency room sign, I saw a giant, neon owl, and the words, “HOOZ DONUTS.”
My mom turned around in her seat and told me, “Your father wanted to stop and get coffee. He’ll be just a minute.”
Then, as an afterthought, she asked, “Do you want anything?”
What I wanted was to not die from a burst appendix in the parking lot of a donut shop. But rather than say what I was thinking, I just sat there and watched as my dad went inside the shop, stepped up to the counter and ordered coffee. He chatted with the only employee in the shop while the kid poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup, then he paid and waited while the same kid fished out twenty-eight cents in change from the register.
How do I know it was twenty-eight cents? Because I watched him drop those same coins into his cup holder when he got back to the car. I had plenty of time to total up the amount while my dad took a sip of his new coffee, set the cup into a different cup holder, and lit up a cigarette. I guess he figured he had two other kids, so if one died in the back seat of the car while he was having his morning coffee and cigarette it wouldn’t be that great of a tragedy.
My dad was always so practical.
He cracked the window (because he was such a thoughtful guy) then finally drove out of the parking lot to take me to the hospital. I sat in the back seat shivering in the 35-degree air blowing over me during the entire drive. Did I mention it was winter? No?
It was winter.
At last we arrived at the hospital. I staggered into the emergency room, hunched over like Quasimodo and grateful I had lived long enough to reach help. I thought the worst of the ordeal was behind me now that I had found trained professionals that could aid me in my hour of need.
I was so very wrong. How much worse could it get? Come back next week, and find out what it’s like to have your surgery conducted by a toddler.
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I know. I miss them terribly, too.