I stopped caring; and at that moment, I realized I had a real problem.
Unfinished laundry slumped in a pile on the floor. Two afternoon appointments were about to get cancelled — in last-minute fashion. And three paramedics were coming to carry me down the stairs of my own home and out to waiting ambulance, as my normally (reasonably) fit body was unable to manage such a simple task.
Ordinarily, any one of these things would bug me. Quite a bit, actually. But on that July 13 afternoon, none of it mattered to me. Put simply, the pain I was feeling in my stomach had reduced me to a man lying on his bathroom floor, waiting for someone with some sort of treatment — anything — to make the pain go away.
Moments earlier, I had been routinely putting the laundry away. Suddenly, a pain started to grow in my stomach. And it grew quickly. Then I started feeling sick. And as the pain continued to grow worse, a new, strange and frightening feeling jumped into the mix: my arms and head started tingling and burning. Yeah, I’m not a doctor, but that just doesn’t seem like a garden variety stomach ache. At this point, the point the pain kept me from doing much more than lying on the floor.
The paramedics would tell me later that my skin was grey. They told my wife that I looked like I was moments away from a massive heart attack. My oxygen level my blood had dropped significantly, so they hooked me up to a tank on the ride over to the hospital. Mercifully, the pain medicine arrived very shortly after I rolled through the ER doors.
And then, the tests began. A CT scan, more blood tests, a transfer to another hospital, an ultrasound, still more blood tests…and nothing. The adventure, or misadventure, had started at 1 p.m., and by midnight I was feeling much more like myself. But no one had a clue as to what had happened. Of course I was very happy to be feeling normal again. But without an answer as to why the pain had come, I was left to wonder when it would come again.
The answer: in less than two weeks.
Monday July 25, the pain came back in mid afternoon, and hung on onto after midnight. Fortunately, it was not quite as severe. And since the hospitals hadn’t really helped solve the mystery, I didn’t want to go back for more non-answers. With fingers crossed on Tuesday for a better, pain-free day, my hopes were squashed by 4 p.m. The pain returned, and it was growing stronger. And I just couldn’t handle another eight straight hours of it again.
So we headed off to the hospital again — but a different one this time.
And luckily, the doctor working that ER found what everyone else had been missing: an obstruction in the gut. And now that obstruction was causing the stomach acid to build up, making the pain all the worse. Getting the acid out meant giving it a new route: a tube, hooked up to a suction machine, that ran up my nose, down my throat and into my stomach. And as much as that tube sucked — literally and figuratively — it was better than the pain.
There was some hope that the tube may be enough to clear the obstruction. So for Tuesday night, Wednesday, and Wednesday night we waited and continued to hope that this plastic tube would work a little miracle. And then, early Thursday morning, my doctor said the risk of waiting any longer was outweighing the risk of solving this problem through surgery.
Eight hours later, I was headed to the operating table. At that point, no one knew exactly why or what the obstruction was. The solution was exploratory surgery, which meant pulling my intestines out of my body onto a surgical table, and hunting down the problem. In my case, the problem is an extremely rare condition known as Meckel’s. The birth defect presents itself in different ways to different people: most often it is discovered by the time a person turns two. For me, the discovery came a few years later. And in my case, it was something like having a second appendix — and a very angry and inflamed one at that — on my small intestine.
The solution was to remove it, along with a section of my small intestine, and then splice the intestine back together again. (And then put everything back inside me and stitch me up.)
This all happened a month ago, and it will probably be another two months more before I’m feeling like I did before all of this started. I am feeling better; and for the past two weeks, I have been enjoying eating like a normal person again. And with a little luck, the 10 percent chance that the scar tissue from the surgery can cause the same problem all over again will never really matter.
