Appendicitis at 62

One friend writes, "You're soon going to run out of organs to be operated on just to miss school."

Tuesday night I started the hour-long drive from school to home feeling fine. About half-way home I began feeling sick to my stomach--which for me usually indicates abdomen pain. I've had a couple of bouts during this school year where I thought I'd been hit with food poisoning, spent a day in bed and finally felt better within two days. I asked the nurse at school if it could be appendicitis and she assured me if it was it wouldn't go away. Plus we all know that's something young people get--not old.

Well, back to Tuesday. I came home, went to bed and hoped that I could sleep off whatever I was feeling. About an hour later I was hit by a 10 pain in my lower right abdomen. I couldn't find a comfortable position and ended up lying face down on the bathroom floor tiles hoping it would pass. I wanted to vomit, but didn't feel like I had the energy to get up. After about 20 minutes I suddenly had this feeling that since I live alone, I didn't want people to find me on my bathroom floor. By that point the pain had gone to about 9 and I was able to get dressed and walk out to my car. I drove to my friends Vic and Janet and asked Janet to drive me to the hospital--I didn't want to be alone or would have taken myself there.

We sat in the emergency room waiting room and then the ER from 8:00 p.m. until 3:40 a.m. when they finally decided it was indeed appendicitis. The operation showed that the appendix had perforated. (Thoughts of people dying from peritonitis flashed through my head, but I decided to trust modern Science and God.)

Three days later I'm walking around, changing my own dressings and hoping that it all will heal quickly.

My reason for writing this is to remind you that if you have a pain in your lower right abdomen and it's nowhere else but there and it reaches a 10 in pain... you just may have appendicitis. I'm proof it can go away and come back, but if it had ruptured the other two times, I may not have been so lucky.