Still sick.

Still not king.

Not even remotely the prettiest.

The tamiflu doesn’t seem to be helping.  Doc says this particular strain lasts ten to fourteen days *minimum*.  Doc should have kept that bit of wisdom to herself, because now I kind of want to get hit by a bus to put me out of my misery.

More updates when I’m no longer a festering ball of snot.

Remember the bull-moose roommate the hospital put in with me post-op?

Whatever she had was contagious.

I’ve been spiking temperatures around 102 for the last four days, prompting a call to the hospital’s infectious diseases department (which, by the way, the hospital denied, saying she wasn’t infectious.  Um. I have what she had.  Isn’t that the definition of infectious?), and almost another trip to the ER when I coughed so hard I bruised around the incision sites.

I’ve been sleeping pretty much 20 hours a day, if not more.  Going back to bed now, in fact.  I’m exhausted from coughing and trying to heal.

I thought you went to the hospital to get *better*, not get infected with a bunch of disease….

So I sort of fell down on my posting at least once a week thing this past week, but I have a Very Good Excuse.

I haven’t felt so hot for around the last month or so.  And really, if I’m honest, I haven’t felt all that hot since last May, but it kind of came and went at random, so I was thinking it was just a side-effect of getting older and that I could live with the fatigue and weirdness after eating.  (I’d either get really, really tired, or my stomach would hurt for *hours* after an actual meal.  I blamed it, honestly, on allergies.  I’m allergic to so many things that I figured there was one I just hadn’t figured out yet.)

Last Sunday, I had what I thought was an upset stomach.  I took it kind of easy and felt okay on Monday…until about 3 o’clock.

Then my side started to hurt.  Kind of like a stitch in my side, but lower.  Like usual, I sort of blamed it on general gallbladder weirdness residual from the Ohio Event of 2007 (what I blamed a lot of stomach ickiness on, really), and went about my life.

At 10 p.m., our DSL line went out.  No internet.  Great.

I called Quest, and sat on the line with some girl who really had no clue why it wasn’t working.  She reset the modem (killing my wireless connection, I might add), and did all this crazy stuff, and finally, at 11:30, said she’d have someone come out and look at it.  By this time, the stitch in my side had started to burn.  I attributed it to stress and went to bed.

The pain woke me up at 1:30.  Then at 3:30.  Then at 4.  Then at 4:17.  Each time, it was a little worse than before, and had spread across my whole abdomen by that point.  And I had to stop fooling myself that it was just stress — this was something Not So Good.

I still didn’t have internet access (of course), so looking on webMD was out.  I texted my friend Angie and asked what side the appendix is on, since the worst of the pain was on the right side, down low.  She confirmed that it was on the right, and informed me that if I didn’t wake up J and have him take me to the ER RIGHT THAT VERY SECOND, she was going to drive over here and kick my ass to the point I’d forget the appendix.

If there’s one thing I know about Angie, it’s that she’d do it.  Then she’d take me to the ER.  But first, the asskicking.  And I was already in enough pain that I felt faint.

We got to the hospital in record time, and the ER staff got us in right away once they determined it might be my appendix.  The doctor came, took blood (phlebotomist was freakin’ hot, by the way), and dosed me with two shots of Demerol.

I don’t remember a whole lot about the next 20 minutes.  I remember J calling my mom and just about everyone we know.  I remember the unBELIEVably hot surgeon (no, seriously.  We’re talking Dr. McDreamy, here.  Carin works in a hospital populated with Very Hot Medical Professionals.  Wowza.) coming in, poking my side, and telling the nurses to prep me for immediate surgery.  They CAT scanned me to make sure it was the appendix.  They told me about the risks and had my husband sign some kind of form since I was clearly impaired.  And they wheeled me into the ER, put something in my IV that was cold inside my arm, and I woke up an hour later sans some vestigal organs.

Apparently, I have a Mutant Appendix.  One that was infected and about to perforate, which sounds a whole lot like a sheet of postage stamps to me, but I get it.  It was highly enlarged, showed signs of being enlarged long-term, and the colon parts of me were wrapped around it in such a way that it was doing weird things to both the colon and the intestines.  (Which, by the way, is exactly why I felt like tired crap after eating.)  The entire surgery took 10 minutes, and that’s only because of the complications.  Apparently, Dr. Hovey (McDreamy) is THE guy to see for laproscopic ANYTHING, and he could win speed trials and accuracy contests.  Talk about a relief.

My room was filled with visitors I wanted to see and one roommate who coughed incessantly and snored like a bull-moose in rut.  Despite the demerol shots and the hydrocodone pills, I got a lot of mostly-error-free knitting done.  My stomach hurts all over, but it feels like a superficial pain, not like the appendix/colon/intestine pain I had before, and I told the recovery room nurses, when I came out from being under anesthesia, that I felt better in that moment than I had for the past month.  And I wasn’t lying, either.

I’m tired, groggy, drugged-up on the LorTab and hurty all over.  Not exactly the best condition for artmaking.  But I’ll be back as soon as the hurtygroggytired subsides a little more.

Just wanted to let you know that I haven’t been abducted by aliens or republicans, and that I’m still here, just a little slower and a few ounces of appendix lighter.

Hope y’all are faring better.  :)  Send me some links to fun sites to see — I’m in the mood for some inspiration. :)