Cutting Up

In case you hadn't heard, Jared is minus one appendix.

I bet all of us have known dozens of people who, when faced with a pain in their right side, remarked, "I wonder if it's my appendix."

Well, Jared's the one guy I know for whom the answer was, "Yes. yes, it is."

When I got to the store yesterday, he was in obvious discomfort; he said he was having sharp pains in his right side, after having general discomfort for a day or two. The pains were increasingly sharp, and he was almost doubling over periodically. It sounded too much like an appendix problem to me, so I suggested he call a doctor.

He did. The doctor (the father of Jenny, his fiancee) suggested he see a doctor locally, since diagnosing the problem over the phone from another state was a dodgy process... but what he was hearing sounded enough like a possible appendix problem that he suggested a more proximate analysis might be called for.

That afternoon, he was off to the local WellStar Urgent Care, since Kaiser couldn't work him in; they did tests, found things they didn't like, and sent him to the emergency room at about 5pm on Friday.

At about 1:30 Saturday morning, Jared went into the operating room and had his appendix removed.

I've talked to him a couple of times since then; he sounds like he's doing as well as can be expected, although he mentioned that they had discontinued the IV pain relief medication, which worked pretty well, in favor of a pill that worked much less effectively. "But it's supposed to last longer," he said.

"Ah, so it doesn't work--but it doesn't work for a longer time," I summarized.

Jared agreed that my analysis seemed to sum up their POV.

They told him he might go home this evening or tomorrow; since I didn't hear anything further this evening, I suspect it'll be tomorrow. I also suspect it will take him another week or so to recover well enough that he'll be back at work.

I suspect he'll have much more to say about this once he's back to normal.