My good buddy and dear friend @Negative Zero has appendicitis! The lad does a lot for the residents of Lake Valor and is such a friendly person! I thought we should all wish him best of luck with this and hopefully, he comes back soon and is feeling a ton better!
I hope you get negative appendicitis to cancel out the appendicitis (that was my attempt to make a pun on your username) In all seriousness, rest up and don’t feel obligated to work until you get better. I hope you feel better soon!
I had appendicitis when I was six...it was not pleasant. I wish you a speedy recovery! I'll try not to destroy VG whilst you're gone, but I make no promises
I hope you'll feel better soon! <3 Better not let anything bad happen to you, you mathematical impossibility >:0 (jk)
I hope you get well soon buddy. Haven't talked to you in a while, but that doesn't mean we ain't still friends.
Thank you all so much! I'm back much sooner than expected because apparently hospitals are doing away with letting you recover from non-complicated removals in the hospital and are just sending people home if things go well. Spoiler: What it might be like if you get appendicitis and an appendectomy You'll start off with some nausea and abdominal pain for a while that starts all over and eventually moves and localizes to the lower right belly. Don't pay too much attention to "it will hurt most after you let go of poking that area", it's not always true. You should go to a hospital ER because they have all the scanning stuff you need, and your clinic might not. Blood tests, urine tests, sonograms, MRI, all that stuff and it will take forever probably. People will ask you redundant questions while poking your belly and watching your body language for pain (be honest). They'll probably want to remove the organ. Once you have been starved/thirsted for long enough that you're empty of future bathroom breaks (since that can make cutting you open very risky), they'll schedule your surgery. Pump you up with antibiotics (in case your appendix bursts, to reduce damage done to the surroundings), knock you entirely unconscious, literally put a breathing tube down your throat (after you're knocked out, and you will have the worst sore throat ever for the rest of the day, so maybe pack some cough drops), and then do the surgery. Apparently laparoscopic (no relation to Lapras) surgery is the thing surgeons like to do now. They cut two holes the width of a dime and one the width of a quarter (or so I'm told, I still have bandages for another 1-2 weeks) in various places in your lower-abdomen (one of which might have been exactly on my navel, which I hope doesn't mess up my cute innie-belly-button), and do various cut-extract-sew-close steps inside you with skinny robo arms. 30-45 minutes of unconsciousness later if all goes well, you'll wake up back in a prep room, they'll talk to you, and send you on your way home. Two weird side-effects: your body is a water balloon made of skin and filled with meat and organs. When that balloon gets opened, air might get trapped inside and hurt really badly higher up in your body (since air is less dense than fleshy bits, which is why we can't fly), like your shoulder. Also, most of your middle-area organs are just pretty much sitting on top of one another, so when you take someone away, everyone else is stacked differently. I for one am literally passing urine differently now because my bladder now has different stuff weighing on it in different ways. The human body is weird and all-connected. So yeah: your appendix is a lazy bum who might eventually decide: I'm tired of not doing anything, so I'm going to rage quit and try to take the rest of the body with me. Spoiler: What I tried to do for some of my overall psychological health with this I admit what I'm about to say is total mysticism nonsense, but I think it's helping me. I'm still fighting my own weakness (weakness in may varieties), and despite making a lot of progress over the past year, I've been getting weaker in some ways lately. I decided in the hour or so leading up to my surgery that I don't only want this rage-quitting organ removed from me, I'd like to get my own negativity removed from me. I spent a lot of time meditating and visualizing that I was pushing all of the weakness and negativity in myself into this one part of my body, and for me I visualized it like pushing sand into a mound. It's very hard to keep a mound of sand neat, so I'm sure some bad parts of me didn't fit onto the bus, but I'm visualizing that a lot of my own tendencies I don't like got removed as well. I suppose I'll find out when I'm fully recovered in 2 weeks, how much of my weakness I've banished. So yes, although I thought I was going to be gone through the weekend, I'm back already! And don't tell me to take it easy, I was taking it easy for the past 30 hours right now and I'm tired of it! I'm all about The Strenuous Life! My constant-dull-pain tolerance is superhuman due to other circumstances, and I'm bored of sitting in waiting rooms and ER beds! Thank you all for your well wishes, and my full recovery is still about 2 weeks out, but I'm back, baby! @BraviaryScout Yeah, I'm sure you have a close understanding of how much it can suck. So far my procedure went well and my recovery seems like it will be smooth (one of my three incisions has bled through the gauze, so I might scar there), and I totally hope your mom's went without a problem! @Dawn The science of organ removal has come along way in recent years. A friend of mine got her appendix removed maybe eight years ago, and she had a more complicated surgery and almost a week of recovery. My ordeal is almost certainly lesser than yours, both with advancement of medical science and have a grown-up's understanding of "this is pain that will lead to healing". @Barandofl Dude, everyone here I consider a friend, even if they're away for way too long! But you're not only my friend, you're also by bro. I'll just start stalking you in the forums so we can cross paths here more often and there won't be any confusion of our broship! Spoiler: Update 10 days later, for anyone who remembers this thread in the future and might want hints on how to handle their own appendectomy The worst part of this was not the pain, but that might only be because my own pain tolerance is messed up by my own history (I took no pain meds since I left the hospital an hour after the procedure). Rather for me, the worst part is coughing/sneezing and keeping my bandages in place. When you cough or sneeze, you flex not only your diaphragm, but also your abdominal muscles, which let's remember, you just had cut apart and reattached. When I cough or sneeze, I do it with gusto: I'm trying to clear my lungs, throat, or nose of debris, so I'm putting all my power into it. And thus, all my power is also pulling on the weakest link of the chain: the part that was just cut apart and reconnected. Super unpleasant. Instead of coughing gently to clear my throat, I need to walk to another room and wheeze/growl until I get that irritating bit of phlegm loose. Instead of sneezing or pinching my nose and holding in the sneeze, I need to entirely dismiss it, do some kind of made up Buddhist monk meditation technique to get the sneeze to entirely go away. It's difficult, but if the sneeze doesn't sneak up on me, I'm able to make it happen reliably now after a few tries on day 1 and day 2. As for the bandages, my incisions were as such: one horizontal one inside the concave part of my belly button (not on the wrinkly bit, but near it), one vertical one a bit a few inches south of my belly button, and a horizontal cut one inch below belly button and two inches to the left (while the appendix itself is to the lower right, and had no cuts near it). The cut in the belly button is fine. Nothing rubs against it, it heals nicely. The bottom middle one is mostly okay: there's underwear covering it, but you may still want a bandage to keep the lint off/out. The middle-elevation to the side is the one that hurts the most. For me, it is exactly at the waistband of my underwear (which according to my mri is too tight), the waist of most of my pants, and where my seatbelt goes. Any time I change from sitting to standing, standing to sitting, adjust my posture, hit a bump on the road or have someone tap the brakes while driving; those three things rub against this cut and its bandages, which will make the bandage fall off quickly and expose this barely-closed wound. I can go through three bandages a day there just trying to keep the friction off, and I wish I kept the original huge bandage on this one longer, because the friction of waistbands and seatbelts hurts just that bad, whether I'm sitting at a table four hours playing a card game or on a road trip dealing with a brakey driver and a seatbelt. This one I wish I would have had a giant bandage with lots of excess space and adhesive to keep it from falling off every two hours. I was this close to putting duct tape over the bandage and just dealing with the tiny bit of mammal hair pulling before my next shower. Summary: 10 days later, coughing and sneezing is still bad and I'm still dealing with using bandages properly, and all this pain and whatever scarring I'm left with is still absolutely worth not dying of appendicitis, which is something that can happen to anyone at any age and any amount of health for no reason at all. Feel free to PM me with questions on your own appendicitis/appendectomy, but only after you get yourself to a hospital.
Glad to hear you're back and recovering! My gallbladder surgery was similar, with only 2-3 scars left (and don't worry, the scar shouldn't damage your belly button too much ;p) and out after a hour or so to recover from the whole 'knock out' thing.
From your description, it doesn't sound like they've come very far along with anything if they still have to shove tubes down your throat to get the job done! That said, I am very glad that it wasn't excessively traumatic for you. Honestly I remember very little of the specifics of my op, only that the damn thing nearly burst inside me because of how long they took to get around to removing it, and that it has had far more damaging long-term consequences on my health. For a useless organ it causes far too much trouble, doesn't it? xD Try to enjoy your recovery time as best you can! A valid reason to not have to do anything for 2 weeks doesn't come around very often, after all~
