He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
So, for those who care, here is a rough breakdown of my recent appendicular situation: (times are approximate)
Wednesday, January 27th — I wake up in the morning with an odd pain in my side. I think at first that it’s a pulled muscle, but it doesn’t act that way. I decide to wait and see what’s up.
Friday, January 29th:
1:45 — The pain is still there, it’s definitely not muscular. I decide a doctor should probably take a look at it, so I call to make an appointment. I’d assumed it’d be for sometime on Monday, but they’d just had a cancellation, so I drive right over.
2:30 — I see the doctor, who is now a general practitioner but had for many years before been an ER doctor. Long story short, he tells me it’s 50/50 that it’s appendicitis. He said that if he’d seen me in an ER, he wouldn’t let me leave without a blood test and CAT scan. Since it was late Friday afternoon, he didn’t feel he could get me those tests quickly enough in his facility, so he sent me over to the local hospital.
3:00 — The body shop where I was having my car worked on, calls to let me know that my car will be ready at 4. Since I know that, even if I don’t have appendicitis, I’ll be in the ER all night long and I’ll be stuck with my crappy rental car over the whole weekend. So I head back to work to tie up a few loose ends and wait for the car.
4:00 — I pick up my car and head to the ER.
4:15 — I go back to the body shop to give them my rental car keys, which I’d forgotten.
4:30 — Arrive at the ER, am triaged, and wait for admission. I call Marika to let her know what’s going on.
6:00 — I’m admitted and shortly later Marika arrives. The staff at Evergreen is very efficient. Within an hour I have an IV in, they’ve drawn blood and have taken a CAT scan. The radiology tech turns out to be a friend of Marika’s, so she helps expedite the process. She’s also really funny and made the whole process go very well.
7:30 — My doctor comes in and confirms that I do, indeed have appendicitis. He says my white count is not much higher than normal, so it probably hasn’t ruptured, but they are going to remove it immediately in any case.
8:00 — I’m taken to the OR and sedated. I remember asking the anesthesiologist if he thinks that I can make it to “4″ at the part where you count down from ten. He doesn’t think it’s funny. I, unfortunately, do not remember much after then, so I’ll never know how far I got.
9:30 — I wake up in post-op. The surgery was a success, I’m cured, hurrah. The rest of the story is just recovery and is not very interesting, apart from one anecdote:
It’s around 2 on Saturday morning and the night nurse has again awakened me to take my vitals. My temperature is 39 °C and she says that I have a slight fever. After she leaves, I start to wonder what 39 °C is in °F and since I can’t get back to sleep, I decide to work it out. I end up with 63.2, a number that certainly isn’t a fever and, were it correct, would have occasioned (I hope) significantly more concern on the part of the nurse.
It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized my mistake — I’d thought, in my drug-induced haze, that the freezing point of water in °F was -32, not 32. So my math was as follows:
°F = (39 * (212 + 32) / 100) – 32 = 63.2
But it should have been:
°F = (39 * (212 – 32) / 100) + 32 = 102.2
Which is indeed a slight fever and probably the reason I got a second course of IV anitbiotics around 4am. My temp is at 98.7 right now, so don’t worry. I’m feeling fine.