posted
On Thursday night, I was going to post a thread asking for advice about my stomach pains. It felt like girl cramps, except in the wrong place. Otherwise I was completely fine (until I threw up, but no nausea with the vomiting... so weird), and actually popsicles made the stomach pain go away. When the pain did its migration downwards later, it actually diminished greatly. Like when the doctors asked me for the 1-10, I told them 2-3. No fever, no diarrhea, just the original stomach pain, and a smaller one later.
I did have appendicitis with surgery on Saturday. I was going to bump an appendicitis thread, but it turns out all the people who started threads about abdominal pain the years had something else.
So come in my fellow appendicitis friends.
Regular surgery or lacroscopic (me)? Did you get pictures (I didn't ) What symptoms did you have? How old were you? How long were you out of work?
Posts: 1757 | Registered: Oct 2004
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I had my appendix out when I was 6. They didn't had have laparoscopy back then. They just held me down and cut me open with their flint knives.
OK, that last part isnt' true.
Did you get pictures? No.
What symptoms did you have?
I had severe pain on the lower right side of my abdomen. I not sure why my parents thought it was serious enough to take me to the hospital but they did. I had elevated white blood cell counts and they decide I needed surgery immediately.
How long were you out of work?
I didn't have a job at the time. I spent 3 or 4 days in the hospital and then they made me stay home from school for another week, which really pissed me off. I loved schoo and felt perfectly finel. I probably would have been much better off in school where I would have been required to stay seated most of the time. At home I ran around like a wild banshee.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
It was January of 2002 when I had mine removed, so 8 years ago, when I was 21.
It started with nausea and vomiting. When the vomiting didn't stop after the first couple of times, I suspected something else might be afoot. I failed the 'hop on your right foot' test that my roommate's mother (a nurse) suggested over the phone, so it was off to the emergency room. My roommates drove me in. I walked into the reception office and immediately (before providing name or insurance cards) asked for (and used) the trash can.
At first, the doctors didn't think it was my appendix. They suspected bad gas (?!), food poisoning, or something else. I didn't have all the signs, at first, but eventually, they came around to the appendicitis conclusion. The appendix came out the next day, around noon. According to the surgeon, it was quite ripe and ready to be removed. I was home that night, so my hospital stay was about 24 hours. It left a lovely 1-2" scar, so I'm not sure what their surgical method was.
I was out of class for maybe a day or two, at most. At the time, I lived on campus, so I could still make it to all my classes while I recovered. I just walked incredibly slowly.
Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
I had mine out when I was 15, and it is a fairly big scar. It's faded over the years, of course, but it wasn't laproscopic.
I had intense pain in my abdomen, nausea and a small amount of vomiting. My case was weird, though. I had been though every test imaginable before that, because I had these weird stomach pains that would come and go. I was told, after multiple doctors and testing, that it was all in my head, that it was psychosomatic or nerves.
When they opened me up, my appendix was 13 inches long, 3.5 inches wide (normal is 3 inches long and an inch wide), shoved partly up my colon, and covered in pus. The pus had hardened over the years, as I have had a pinhole leak in my appendix for about 5 -6 years, and had formed hardened strings covering the area.
When they lifted it out, it broke. I would have died within an hour of two if they had not gotten it out right then and there, they said.
I was in great shaped, as I was on the swim team at the time. I was out of the hospital within 22 hours of admittance, up and walking without prompting 8 hours after surgery. I was back in school 3 days later, and back in the water 2 weeks after it ( 2 weeks earlier than recommended). I swam in the regionals 4 weeks later (5-6 weeks after surgery), and came in 13th out of 50 or 60 swimmers in the butterfly.
The pain was on the wrong side and actually felt like an enlarged ovarian cyst, a problem I'd been dealing with off and on for a year. One morning I just couldn't take the pain and had my college roommate drop me off at the hospital on her way to class.
After several hours of waiting and paperwork, I started to run a fever. The doctors did an ultrasound of my stomach after I shared my suspicions but said they couldn't see anything. They became worried that if I had a cyst, it had twisted. They decided to proceed with exploratory surgery and the last thing I was told before being put to sleep was I might lose my ovary on that side.
When I woke up my mom was there (having driven completely across the state in record time) and she and a nurse explained that it was appendicitis. You can't imagine the relief. My mom drove me to our family home the next day since a holiday break was just around the corner. Thank goodness for pain killers! A five hour car ride after surgery is no fun.
I had laprocopsy but still have three scars. They're pale like me but sort of puckered so the skin lays funny.
In a followup appointment with my surgeon back in my college town, he showed me a picture of my appendix and explained how the vast amounts of scar tissue on it probably meant I'd had repeated bouts of appendicits over the last year. I'd either confused the pain with an ovarian cyst or not even noticed it. According to him this is very uncommon.
Six months later I had a sudden and dangerous case of tonsilitis and had them removed as well. That was the year all my organs jumped ship.
Posts: 1733 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
Dang, Kwea. They had me up and walking within hours, obviously. But it was at least two weeks before I attempted to do sit-ups. I can't imagine swimming that soon afterward.
I also had at least one session of abdominal pain about a year before the appendix came out. I always chalked it up to something else, but there's no way to know for sure.
Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
Yeah, they told me 3 weeks before you even ENTER the water in swim class, and 6-8 weeks before you START swimming for the team again.
I didn't listen.
Hell...I woke up, then pulled myself out of bed after an hour to go to the bathroom. Then I decided to take a very, very slow walk. After all, I remember thinking "You won't get better lying around in bed, you'll just get stiff.".
I was a moron, and almost gave my nurse a heart attack. She came in, and I was gone. I was suppose to still be out cold. LOL
Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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I wasn't going anywhere right after the surgery. I kept passing out because of the anesthetic wearing off. I'd be awake for a few minutes, asleep for a few minutes, and then awake again, repeat ad nauseum for a few hours.
Posts: 1813 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: How old were you?
I had my appendix out when I was 6. They didn't had have laparoscopy back then. They just held me down and cut me open with their flint knives.
:: laugh ::
That's actually not all that far off from my grandmother's experience. The doctor performed the operation in my great grandparents' kitchen, with relatives holding her in place while the doctor worked. I assume that some sort of anesthetic was used, but I don't know the details.
In any case, my great grandfather was able to help by pointing out where the appendix actually was when the doctor couldn't find it. There's a mutation that runs in my family that causes it to be located back behind where it's usually located.
Mine turned out to be in the same spot as hers was. I had my appendix out in the summer of 1999, when I was 28. My symptoms were a combination of pain in my back and uncontrollable vomiting. I still remember being in the emergency room, telling an orderly that I was about to throw up, and having him hold out this tiny little kidney shaped plastic basin for me to throw up into. I said "I don't think that's going to be big enough", or words to that effect, and let loose. It was shallow enough that it basically just redireted the stream without catching much if any of it.
The surgeon went in laparoscopically, and was apparently surprised enough by how little inflamation there was that he was skeptical that it was the cause of my symptoms. He removed the thing anyway, successfully resolving the problem, and I was discharged the next day. Recovery took a surprisingly long time, though I can't remember now exactly how long that actually was. I think that I was out of work for three days after the surgery, and didn't feel like my normal self for several weeks. I remember being surprised by how quickly I became fatigued doing ordinary things like walking through a grocery store. I felt like I had some inkling of what it would be like, being an old man.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Kwea: When they opened me up, my appendix was 13 inches long, 3.5 inches wide (normal is 3 inches long and an inch wide), shoved partly up my colon, and covered in pus.
posted
I had mine out the summer I was 12. I was having trouble keeping food down (I have a distinct memory of eating Cheerios and vomiting them up still whole a short time later) the night after a (religious) fast, and then in the morning I complained of abdominal pain on the right side. My parents recognized the symptoms and my dad whisked me off to the emergency room. Apparently I was walking/standing with the textbook posture (hunched over, protecting the right side of the abdomen) -- so much so that while they did the blood test, it was a foregone conclusion by the doctor as to what the results would be, and they started admitting me without waiting for the test.
This was a Friday morning, so my mom was at home with the other 4 kids (including my 1-month-old sister) trying to get ready for Shabbos, but my dad stayed with me (as much as they let him). I remember them putting me to sleep, telling me that when I woke up it would be over . . . and then waking up because the drugs had worn off, but still not having gone into surgery. There had been a major bus crash, and the emergency surgeries had bumped all the rest of us. Because I was in a pre-surgical waiting area, my dad wasn't allowed to be there, and I was confused and scared (and still a bit loopy from the drugs). Eventually I did get into the OR, and I vaguely recall counting backwards.
Probably because of the multi-hour wait, my appendix had ruptured (not so much burst as leaked), which meant they were especially concerned about infection. So they didn't stitch the outside of the incision (this was WAY before laparoscopic) closed -- it had to be cleaned and re-bandaged twice a day. Which hurt quite a bit for the first couple weeks. After that it was just annoying.
My dad left shortly before Shabbos started (I was pretty woozy and on heavy pain meds anyway), and my mom walked over (about 3-4 miles each way, and she was less than 6 weeks postpartum!) the next day. I have a strong memory of trying to talk to her but she was talking all sorts of crazy nonsense. It took her weeks afterward to convince me that it was actually me (you know, the one doped up on pain pills?) who had been babbling incoherently.
I ended up in the hospital for a week, and on bed rest for another 2 weeks. (It may have been one week bed rest, one week severely restricted activity, actually.) Since I had been supposed to leave for summer camp the day after I wound up in the hospital, I was NOT a happy camper. ( )
I still have a large, fairly ugly, scar.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Kwea: When they opened me up, my appendix was 13 inches long, 3.5 inches wide (normal is 3 inches long and an inch wide), shoved partly up my colon, and covered in pus.
I finally got told the size of mine:
I found out at the doctor's today that mine was 5 cm long and 0.9 cm wide when extracted. Are you sure there isn't a units problem there?
If not, well, you got some phone calls to make, because ...
posted
Nope. Positive, because I had a major issue because of it. It swelled up and the infection almost went systemic. Also, they said the small leak in it for years probably spurred unusual growth.
The Doc said it was the largest one he had ever seen, or even heard of, and it would have killed me outright if it had ruptured while inside of me. That wasn't it's normal size, it was due to rapid swelling caused by severe infection. If it had been that size normally, it would have been a record. It also wouldn't have ruptured my intestine either.
It also damages some of my internal organs, and they had to be repaired as well.
Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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posted
Nah...that was the normal size of his organ, mine was inflamed. The Doc even told me about that when it happened. He said my normal appendix size was probably about 3 1/2 inches long, and about 1/2 an inch wide, but that when it swelled it actually scrunched together in a back and forth shape, and injured other organs because of the lack of space for it.
All I know if that it hurt like crazy, and that I still have issues at times because of some of what was done during that surgery. I don't want to get into what issues, as it is a little gross (and private), but there are still some minor issues that I will live with for the rest of my life because of the unusual way this happened.
Most people don't have a pinhole leak in theirs for years either. Posts: 15082 | Registered: Jul 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Kwea: Nah...that was the normal size of his organ, mine was inflamed. The Doc even told me about that when it happened. He said my normal appendix size was probably about 3 1/2 inches long, and about 1/2 an inch wide, but that when it swelled it actually scrunched together in a back and forth shape, and injured other organs because of the lack of space for it.
All I know if that it hurt like crazy, and that I still have issues at times because of some of what was done during that surgery. I don't want to get into what issues, as it is a little gross (and private), but there are still some minor issues that I will live with for the rest of my life because of the unusual way this happened.
Most people don't have a pinhole leak in theirs for years either.
As it turns out, the previous record holder also had an inflamed appendix, not a very large natural one:
I feel you could still claim a title that is rightfully yours. Given that you have to live with the complications, you've earned it. Event though the other nurses might be in awe of you.
Or I'm just sad that mine was 5 cm long on removal. Seriously. How lame is that? Less than two inches. Normal people have 10 cm appendixes. The little autopsy said it was red and brown though. At least now I know why it didn't make me as ill as a lot of other people have described.
Posts: 1757 | Registered: Oct 2004
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I feel you could still claim a title that is rightfully yours. Given that you have to live with the complications, you've earned it. Event though the other nurses might be in awe of you.
