Our trip to the hospital...for Matt that is.

Hey everyone,

So almost one week ago, back on September 21st, I was at work and started feeling some pains in my stomach. I know, I know, many fathers-to-be experience sympathy pains and it's completely natural but what I was feeling was not natural at all. After dealing with the pain all day on Monday I figured it would just go away with a good night sleep and some much needed rest. But when I woke up on Tuesday morning and it didn't get any better, I knew something was up. For those of you who know me well, you know that I'm not one to make a doctors appointment very easily but for some reason this day was different. When I was a kid, I swore that I had Appendicitis and my dad rushed me to the Urgent Care only for the pain to go away as soon as we got into the parking lot. So with that thought in my head, I went online on Tuesday morning and typed in "where is your appendix located?" into the search term. When the search results came back and said that the Appendix is located in your lower right abdomen, my heart kind of dropped because that is exactly where the pain that I had been experiencing was located.
With that, I made a doctors appointment immediately. When the doctor told me that I needed to go to the ER right away because he couldn't accurately diagnose my condition I was immediately worried.

So with that news, I headed to the emergency room and called Gemma to let her know. She was obviously very concerned and went to meet me at the hospital. It was a typical ER experience, a lot of waiting to even get into the hospital and then when my name was called they hooked me up to an IV and put us on a stretcher in the middle of the ER, not a great spot to be located as we were pretty much in the heart of all of the traffic. I thought that I would go in and they would be able to let me know what was going on immediately but I found out that I would have to drink a Crystal Light type mixture so that they could do the CT Scan. The only problem was that I was only allowed to drink one cup every 20 minutes and I had to drink about half a gallon, or at least it seemed that way. After about 2 hours, I finally was able to get the CT Scan done and after another hour of waiting, 5 hours in total at that point, the doctor came over to me and said, "yep, it's definitely appedicitis and we're going to have to get that thing out tonight." At that point, a part of me was relieved that it wasn't something more serious, but the other part of me was extremely nervous knowing that I would need surgery immediately.

They finally put us in a room in the ER and said that they would try and work me into the operating room schedule that evening but it would probably be a couple of hours. With that, Gemma asked the doctor if it was okay to go home and pick up some of my stuff and to take the dog out and the doctor said that she would have plenty of time. Yet, after she was gone for 15 minutes, one of the doctors came into my room and said okay it's time to go, we have an operating room ready to go. Of course, I was not happy at all because I really wanted to be with Gemma before I had to go into surgery. So I called Gemma to let her know, told her I loved her and did the the best job of stalling I could. They took me up to the operating floor and I spoke to the anesthesiologist and about 20 minutes later I asked what the deal was and if we were going to get this show on the road and the nurses said that they were waiting for my wife because I told them she was on her way back. So I bbm'ed Gemma and she was just outside the operating hallway, she was able to come in and that made all the difference in the world. It felt so good to be able to see her before I went under and I'm so happy I stalled and the nurses were so understanding. What came next wasn't my favorite but I don't remember a ton. I remember getting wheeled through the operating hallway and into the room, I scooting onto the operating table and they strapped my arms and legs down and put about 20 warm blankets all over me. They put a mask on my face and told me that it was oxygen and to breath deeply but there was no way that was exygen. The last thing I remember was telling them that I was still awake and then I was out.

When I woke up, I was in recovery and Gemma was there, I don't remember much of that conversation except she said I was officially drugged up and said some pretty hilarious things. From recovery, they took me up to my room and I went to bed for the night. Gemma came to see me in the morning and after a rough morning of pain and pain killers, I was able to leave the hospital around midday the next day. It's been about a week and the pain is getting better and I'm feeling stronger everyday but it definitely was a pretty tramatic experience. The good news is that it's over and it's taken care of.

So that's the long, drawn out story of why we made a trip to the hospital last week but not for the reason that everyone expected:) I just wanted to say thank you and I love you to my wife for being so supportive and so calm during the entire ordeal, she was by far the calm one out of the two of us and her strength really helped me get through the whole ordeal. Well I'm sorry for the novel of a blog but there was a lot to explain and it was a crazy situation. Hopefully the next time we make a trip to the hospital it's for a much more amazing reason:) Talk to you everyone soon.

Matt