Not quite in perfect health

Yesterday, my health insurer was running a health fair. I showed up at 11.40 am to have my pressure, cholesterol, body mass index, etc. checked. "You're in perfect health!," beamed the nurse as she went over the results.

Leaving the health fair, I felt hungry, so I skipped my usual lunchtime visit to the gym and went back to eat lunch at my desk. Surprisingly, the hunger didn't go away but I didn't think much about it. I even went to play bridge at the Norman club in the evening. The bridge game ended at 10.30pm and the abdominal pain by then was quite severe. I didn't even wait for the last pair to turn in their results -- this even though we were coming in second at the time (thanks, W!) and there is nothing I like more than seeing how many Masterpoints a good showing translates to.

I went home and promptly threw up my dinner. By midnight, the pain was getting quite unbearable. By 1.30 am, the wife called a doctor friend who came by (yes, an amazingly good friend), felt my stomach, listened to my story of how the pain had spread from the mid-abdomen to the right and told me that I likely had appendicitis.

He then drove me to the emergency room. As luck would have it, at 2am on a Thursday morning, there was another trauma case -- this one a police pursuit with bleeding victims. I was doubled over in pain, but the nurses were all treating the bleeding fugitives. My friend (he works at that hospital) went out and found a nurse to give me painkillers intravenously. A CAT scan later, I was scheduled for surgery and by 9 am I was out of surgery missing an appendix. 12 hours after the surgery, I feel good enough to type in this blog post.

Over a course of 24 hours I went from being in perfect health to having and losing an inflamed vestigial organ.