Emergency appendectomies are fun 👎🏻

The Internet tells me that there is a one in four chance that women will have an appendectomy in their lifetime. It's about twice the odds of a man, because women have a lot of adjacent procedures where they're already in there removing stuff. The more you know. Well, apparently it was Diana's turn.

Diana was having abdominal pain yesterday, and actually the night before, but she just chalked it up to gas or something. But it kept getting worse, until around 12:30 a.m. this morning, when we decided it was time to go to the ER. I couldn't imagine that it was anything other than a bowel obstruction or appendix if it wasn't going away, and it turned out to be the latter. They had her on morphine, and she had a CT around 2. There was some problem in radiology (technical or staffing, I don't know), and we waited and waited to hear about the results. Since she was out from the morphine, I left at 3:40, knowing that I had to get Simon up in three hours for school. I slept poorly for about two hours and did that. I had to drive him because of a driver issue the day before, and just before we left, she called to let me know that she needed an appendectomy. That was five hours after the CT. Simon didn't even know she was in the ER, so I left it that way and took him to school.

Diana was still loopy from drugs, so she suggested I squeeze out another hour of sleep, which went poorly because of the kittens playing grab-ass on the bed. By this time, she was transferred to a real room, and on the schedule for 3:30 for surgery. I got back to the hospital finally at 11:30. The plan was to fetch Simon out of school an hour early, so she could see us in pre-op. I was firm in describing to Simon that this is the most common abdominal surgery there is, low risk, and relatively routine (if there is such a thing with surgery, though I referred to it as a "procedure"). He panicked a little, and did not care for all of the wires and tubes, but he did OK.

Sitting around waiting for her felt like a horrible idea, so I took Simon to McDonald's for an early dinner at 4. Just what my now-activated IBS needed. Gross. We got back to her room around 4:30, when the surgeon called and said everything went smoothly. Now she's just sleepy and recovering. It's been a rough 24 hours for Diana, and I'm just glad that she's OK.

I finally have reason to be happy that I don't have a job, because today was rough, and I'm running on fumes. Because American healthcare sucks, there'll be a nice big deductible for this, after the ER co-pay, and because she's changing jobs, our deductible clock starts over again next month. On the other hand, we have a good reminder about how special medical workers are, from the security guard to the nurses to the doctors. Their kindness is unmatched. We all experienced that during Covid, and I feel like we've already forgotten.