The Day.

“At least you’ll never have to go through it again,” the doctor smirks from the foot of my $1,300 dollar a night hospital bed. “One can only have their appendix out once in their lifetime.”

Comforting thought, was the first response without a swear word tagged on the end of a sentence that came to mind as I silently curse to myself in pain.

“Thanks doc. Thank you for saving my life.”

The discomforting gut pain, which morphed into a five-day stay at the hospital for an emergency open appendectomy surgery, began on Sunday morning around 3 a.m. The pain in my lower abdomen, like excruciating poop cramps rolling from one side of my midsection to the other, was relentless. For the next two-and-one-half hours I struggled between getting a below average night’s sleep and desperately trying to relieve myself in the bathroom, only to my growing frustrations and to no avail.

By 6:30 a.m. I forced myself to the bathroom three or four times, vomiting about the same number of times until absolutely nothing was left in my stomach or intestines except that yellow, stinky mucus we all have grown to love to hate. I was not having fun.

Since moving to Pennsylvania our family has been sick several times. The progression of illness usually begins with Adrianne, moves to Taylor and then Simon, and finally it makes its way to me. It doesn’t help that my wife works in the hospital or that she completed her orientation working on the floors with isolation units. Just the same, we’ve each experienced several days of unaccustomed infirmity over the last few weeks in the Gross’ house. Because of this, I thought very little of my pains beyond the normal frustrations of having a viral infection on a warm summer day as my wife and sister-in-law took our kids swimming in our new 4’ x 11’ green and white blowup pool in the backyard.

I spent a good portion of the morning and early afternoon laying flat on my back, wreathing in agony before trying to fall asleep upstairs. The pain was like nothing I had ever experienced before. I thought, and Adrianne mentioned this more than once, that the pain could be originating from my appendix. But since our insurance coverage did not kick in for another five days, I could not convince myself to go to the emergency room, spending hundreds or thousands of dollars of blood tests, CT scans and the like, and have the chance of being sent home with a handful of Tums or being told that I have a stomach virus. Life is hard enough. The last thing I wanted to do is add another bill on to the piles of unpaid bills we already have.

By 11:30 p.m. I knew I was in trouble. Simon woke up around 11 p.m. for a last minute snack before sleeping the remainder of the night in his cozy green pack and play. While holding him, I broke out into a terrible, cold sweat, pain radiated from below my belly button to the right quadrant of my abdomen. “This isn’t good,” I thought to myself as I was bent over on the bathroom floor attempting to find a position to relieve the pain before struggling back into bed. I did not know what I was going to do. I decided, haphazardly, to continue to ignore the pain, crawl back into bed, and reevaluate my options with Adrianne first thing in the morning. I never had the opportunity.

By 12:30 p.m. my moaning and bellyaching woke Adrianne from her restful slumber. Still stubborn and refusing to go to the ER, Adrianne had me bring my laptop upstairs and we surfed the Internet looking for an answer to the symptoms I was having. The answer was unquestionably appendicitis.

After several unsuccessful attempts to convince me to go to the ER, Adrianne asked one final question that, for me, put everything in perspective: “If we had insurance, would you have gone to the hospital hours ago?” The rhetorical question did not need an answer. I got dressed, grabbed the car keys, and left.

Suffice it to say, forty minutes after checking into the ER my appendix burst. And a five-day stay shortly followed the two-hour emergency surgery.

Looking back, the signs and symptoms of my appendicitis were not clear-cut. The pain in my abdomen did feel like an intestinal virus or, as Adrianne suggested, a swelling of the bladder or intestine. It was not until late Sunday night that I knew for certain that something was horribly wrong with my body. To make matters even more convoluted, the first doctor I saw in the ER– after receiving three doses of intravenous pain medications– planned to send me home with painkillers; he thought I had kidney stones. It was only by the grace of God that a surgeon, who, ironically, had already performed three appendix surgeries that night, stopped by my room to look in on me. He was the only one in the ER that night to correctly diagnose my condition. One can only wonder what would have happened to me if I had gone to the ER earlier in the day or had not been visited by the surgeon walking by my room and sent home loaded with pain medications.