Three years ago I plied you with my emergency gall bladder surgery experience and it's deterioration so extreme the National Museum of Health and Medicine inquired about the specimen. (I might have imagined that). I vowed never anything like that pain again. Man proposes and God disposes, so I should not have been surprised by my next pain chapter, a ruptured appendix, sending me into the same hospital and a room with nearly the same lovely view of the James J Hill house and the Basilica.
My appendix, in the words of a surgical nurse, was no longer an appendix but rather a blob of acute inflammation heading toward abscess, a phlegmon, kind of a cute name for something so nasty.
[Findings suggest a contained, perforated appendicitis with phlegmon/developing abscess]
It caused me to wonder how many necrotic organs I can produce and surrender before the entire vessel goes that route. Both the gall bladder and appendix seem like minor, mostly useless organs one can do without. So it seems unfair that they can cause such extreme pain and threaten your life. Compared to the sibling organs in the abdominal cavity, these two are pretty small potatoes, so to speak, not even meriting redundancy like kidneys or lungs or eyes. But my gall bladder was gangrenous for Pete’s sake and the appendix was about to rupture with peritonitis a real possibility. Another near run thing. How many of those do you think you're allotted?
I was under the assumption that an acute appendicitis sufferer was wheeled into an OR, cut open, sewed up and sent home with an ice cream cone. But medical procedures have apparently advanced since 1955. Nowadays, surgery is something to be avoided if at all possible. Knowing a few surgeons, this is quite amazing to me as they seem to live to cut you open. Instead, the treatment was mega intravenous doses of the antibiotic Zosyn plus liter upon liter of Ringers lactate. After a couple bloody IV's, my arm looks like I'd been in a knife fight and came in second. I went into the hospital with a high fever, stomach and back pain and feeling generally pretty rotten. I confess I was pretty sure this was all kidney related but after a CT readout the UR soon put my self-diagnosis to rest and sent me on to the ER and 3 days in a hospital bed. A lesson - if you are your own medical or legal advisor, you have a fool for doctor or lawyer.
The saga is not over by any means. I continue on a twice daily antibiotic regimen with pills that cover the palm of my hand. And I must visit a surgeon in a couple weeks for another CT scan and an assessment, where the penchant to flash the scalpel may be too great to overcome.
... to be continued
Copyright © 2026 Dave Hoplin
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