(Originally written 9/22/06)
I honestly just thought it was gas. I'd been in New York City for four days, and had been rigorously sticking to my typical "NYC diet" -- pizza, Chinese dumplings and beer -- so I wasn't totally surprised when I woke up last Thursday bloated to the point of severe discomfort. When alka-seltzer and phazyme failed to deflate my ballooned gut, I just figured that time (and a couple of well-placed salads) would eventually sort it out.
But when I arrived that night at my Dad's summer place in lovely Ocean Grove, NJ, I still felt like utter dogshit. I woke up in the middle of the night with a serious fever, and my gut hurt so bad I had to take off my sweatpants, because the pressure of the elastic waistband was making things even worse. At this point, I knew I was really sick -- a flu bug, or something. But acute appendicitis? That's for, like, ten year olds, right?
Apparently not. One of the great mysteries of the human body, the appendix once served some discernable purpose, but now it seemingly exists only to cause trouble; and unless youve already had yours removed, there's a five percent (or so) chance that your appendix will go bad at some point in the future. And if you don't get it taken out in time, you can easily die from shock or peritonitis. Mine went real, REAL bad -- it somehow snuck behind my colon, perforated itself and glommed onto said colon like an unholy barnacle. What should have been an hour-long operation with a next-day checkout turned into a three-and-a-half-hour marathon with a six-day hospital stay.
I'd like to say that my days at the Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune, NY afforded me ample time for deep reflection, but when you're simultaneously shaking off the effects of anaesthesia and begging the nurse for more painkillers, it's hard to string a complete sentence together, even in your head. As such, my thoughts were pretty much limited to how much I absolutely loathe ESPN's fat n' fatuous sportscaster Chris Berman, and wondering how long it would take before I could walk again under my own power without having to plot out each step in advance. Mercifully, the human body has an amazing capacity for healing, so I was able to stop fixating on the latter after a few days. (Chris Berman, however, remains on my eternal shit list. Did I really hear you say, "9/11 was the word that changed everything for our country" on Monday Night Football? Come over to my hospital bed so that I may kick your flabby, pointless ass.)
The JSUMC turned out to be a great place, as hospitals go: comfy beds, cool and friendly staffers (including the surgeons), and excellent facilities. The bummer with any hospital stay, of course, is that you never know who you're going to end up rooming with. The first and third gentlemen who shared my room were nice enough guys with good senses of humor, not given to moaning or abusing the nurses or any of that other "gets old really quick" shit. But the second guy... I'll call him Gary, because that's what everyone else was calling him. Big ex-Marine, probably in his late 50s or early 60s; he was in for shoulder surgery, but had also just found out he had lung cancer. A bad deal, to be sure, so I was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least until I had to witness countless the displays of dysfunctional bullshit between him, his wife, and his twin brother Larry.
Gary's wife, as far as I could tell, was an absolute saint; she'd sit with him for ten hours a day then go off to work for the evening, and somehow in between she found time to hook him up with a really choice seaside place for his shoulder rehab. But Larry, another former Jarhead, found constant fault with every decision she was making for his brother; and instead of backing her up, Gary would say things to her like, "I don't trust you to make the right decisions for me, because youre not here enough to know what's really going on." (This from a guy who spent most of his nocturnal hours in our room yelling through his vicodin haze for the State Police because hed been "kidnapped".)
For me, the final kicker was when Larry stomped into the room and announced to Gary, right in front of the wife, "I'm pissed at you, because you lied to me three weeks ago when you told me that I was the executor of your will. I didnt know this GOLD-DIGGER was on there!" At which point, any real man (like, you know, A MARINE) would have told him to can that gold-digger shit and take it outside, but Larry just lamely went, "No, you ARE the executor!" Turning to his wife, he continued, "I'm sorry, honey, that's always been the way in our family. We are always the executors of each other's wills." Nice sentiment, and nice timing. I was really hoping she'd just up and ditch the worthless prick right there. When they were alone, Larry and Gary talked a lot of "semper fi" Marine jargon with each other, like they were these manly, bad-ass dudes, but this woman was clearly tougher and far more capable than either of them.
Thankfully, halfway through Gary's stay, my father showed up with my iPod, which allowed me to keep the rest of their family drama at bay. And for those of you who've never had the opportunity to mix the two, let me categorically state that 2 mgs of morphine and Brian Eno's "Music For Airports" go together blissfully well.
Though its been a serious physical (and at times, mental) ordeal, and I've probably lost about $3000 in freelance work as a result, I actually feel really grateful about the whole thing. My appendix was clearly a time bomb waiting to go off; and with the amount of traveling I do, it could have happened anywhere. I am so thankful that it happened while I was with my family, and in close proximity to a top-notch medical center, rather than on, say, the back of the Mastodon tour bus while driving through rural Louisiana in the middle of the night. Once again, like with last year's car accident (where some fucker t-boned my car and sent it sailing and spinning across the intersection, and I somehow emerged without a scratch), the angels were clearly looking out for me. Thanks, guys. I'm not sure why you're keeping me around, but I do seriously appreciate it!
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