Not out of the woods

See and until now it sounds like a normal, routine appendix-removal. It sounds fine and really if just getting my appendix out and being send home was all it was, I wouldn't be writing this at all.

Everyone keeps telling me I need to take it easy. I need to go slow. I need to give myself time to heal. My doctor said I needed two weeks after getting out of the hospital before I go back to work.

I'm not used to sitting around all day and barely being able to walk to the park. I'm not used to taking it easy. My right hand is still sore but I called the BC Nurse line and they said it can take up to a week for an IV vein to feel right again.

I went home from the hospital for the first time on Friday, June 6. Saturday I sat around and watched TV and drank water and tea. My temperature hovered around 38.3 and 38.5 -- but didn't hit the magic 38.5.

Saturday night we went to bed and the mice came out. I swear there were mice in the kitchen. I could hear them scratching through the cupboards. Chris told me I was imagining things and told me to go to sleep.

I couldn't sleep. My t-shirt was soaked. I got up and went to kitchen at 2 a.m. to get a glass of water. I knocked over a glass and it broke. I leaned down to get it up and started bawling my eyes out. Poor Chris.

I refused to go back to bed and instead lay on the couch. I woke up at 8 and again began sobbing. It felt like the world was falling down around me. My temperature was only 38 degrees. My stomach was distended but no more than when I left the hospital. What scared me the most was my face. I hardly recognized it -- I was the colour of linen or an old white sheet.

We called the BC Nurse line (a great free service that's part of the BC Health Guide. The line lets you talk to registered nurse and find out what you need to do for a bunch of different medical conditions. They kind of answer the question "Should I go to a doctor for this?" Phone 604-215-4700).

The lady talked to me and then said, "There's a lot going on. I could tell you how to fix one of your symptoms but I think you need to go back to emergency."

Still crying (remember, I don't cry much) I insisted on taking a shower before we left. We showed up at Richmond Hospital again. Again I refused to sit down and after showing them the stitches on my belly they gave me a bed as Chris checked me in.

It got scarier. The doctor came in and talked to me for two minutes and then ordered an immediate CAT scan (it took a few hours to get one last time). I hear him say, "This girl is really sick, she's not going anywhere."

I had my IV hooked up again and again they pumped me full of saline and morphine. They poked and all the doctors from the first time came back and looked at me worried.

It was my mom's birthday. Chris called and left a message.

They started me on a kind of "super" antibiotic. I'm allergic to penicillian and this is a relation, but they hoped I wouldn't react. I was going to be on it for a couple days, staying in the hospital.

The surgeon explained that they were worried I was developing an abscess -- a walled off bit of infection, possibly more likely because of the salmonella I still had in my system. He said if it got worse they would treat it with a long needle inserted in my stomach or ultrasound. "We shouldn't have to cut you open again," he said.

I got moved up to the sixth floor, in a shared room this time. I was the youngest person by far in the room and everyone else seemed far sicker. My parents came, Chris sat with me, everyone looked worried, but less worried than on Wednesday.

They kept on with the morphine until Monday.

By Monday morphine made me feel like my head was collapsing in. I was reading a book called Einstein: His life and universe. It was like feeling the atoms of my body collapsing in. Everything kept going dark. I don't know how you could get addicted to that feeling. It felt like I no longer existed. I wanted to be better.