The story really starts around lunchtime on Wednesday, when I was playing hoops in our regular pick-up game. On the first play of the first game, I whacked my right ring finger against something and sprained it a bit (I’ve done this dozens of times, so recognize the feeling…), and then late in the second game, I took a knee in the shin in a way that made me see stars, and by the time we finished the game and I made my way down to the locker room, there was already a big swollen welt there. So I spent the rest of the afternoon in “Every f*&king thing hurts” mode, icing my leg during a faculty meeting, and gritting my teeth through taking SteelyKid to a doctor appointment and then serving as first-base coach for her softball game that night. At bedtime, I took a couple of over-the-counter naproxen to help with the pain and swelling.

In the morning, my leg was somewhat better (though with a garish purple welt on my shin), and my finger was sore and purple, so I took another naproxen before heading off to write at Starbucks and the get a haircut before going to campus. I grabbed a bagel at the Breugger’s next to the barbershop, and as I was walking in from the parking lot to my office, noticed that it wasn’t sitting super well.

“Great,” I thought, “Those naproxen helped with the leg, but they’ve aggravated my heartburn.” And, sure enough, as the morning wore on, my stomach continued to feel not-great. In addition to being a little unsettled, I was getting a kind of stitch in my side, like I had run a long distance, or pulled a muscle. Which we really weird, as the most strenuous thing I had done all morning was standing up out of a chair…

We had a lunchtime colloquium, and I felt really unwell at that, and my side was getting painful, so as soon as it finished, I headed home to take a nap. Which didn’t really help.

While sleeping, an email had come in saying that The Pip’s baseball game Thursday night was rained out, so I texted Kate to say “Hey, I’ll get the kids, but my stomach is messed up, so once you get home, I’m likely going to bed.” She replied sympathetically, and I started to write back “It’s OK, I just have this weird sharp pain in the lower right part of my abdomen…” And then changed it to “You know what, I’m going to Urgent Care to get this looked at.”

Something like six hours later, after winding my way through the bureaucracy of emergency medicine, I was lying on a gurney in an operating room, waiting to be put under for an emergency appendectomy. So, that was fun.

(They did eventually give me a dose of morphine, while waiting on the CT scan results, which I had never had before. It didn’t exactly make the pain go away, but it made it seem a lot less important…)

Happily, it’s 2019, and they can do an appendectomy laparoscopically these days. Roughly 24 hours after I noticed that my stomach was messed up, I was home, with three small incisions in my belly, and one less vestigial organ. It’s more than a little amazing when you think about it– we may not be living in the future with flying cars, but the fact that what used to be major abdominal surgery is now a home-the-next-day kind of deal is a testament to how far medical technology has come.

I’m going to be moving slowly and gingerly for a while yet, but I was able to go to the kids’ games of modified rounders on Saturday (SteelyKid went 2-3 at the plate, and scored both times she got on base; The Pip was 3-3 and made five outs in the field). And even when I woke up in the hospital, the post-surgical pain was nowhere near what I had from the inflamed appendix.

Many thanks to the medical professionals at the Albany Med urgent care facility in Niskayuna, and especially at Ellis Hospital, where everybody from the ER to the OR to the nursing staff who watched me overnight was very professional and cheerful (though honestly, I could’ve done with a bit less cheer when checking my vitals at 3am…). They certainly seem to have done a good job, and given how I was on Thursday afternoon, I’m remarkably comfortable now.

And, of course, infinite gratitude to Kate, who not only has to deal with wrangling the kids and Charlie the pupper through my period of medically-ordered uselessness (I’m not supposed to lift anything over ten pounds for the next couple of weeks), but has to badger me into not overexerting myself as I go stir crazy during said medically-ordered uselessness. If you believe in the ability to send people positive energy via warm thoughts and the like, direct it all her way…