Stupid Appendix

Other

Entry posted by Guest June 13, 2005

845 views

So I purchased the 5200 version of MS. PacMan today. I was wandering around the antique stores in Crosby, MN. Sure I paid too much for it, $5.00, but after finding something Atari related in an antique store, I just got a thrill from buying it. Besides, I didn't have a MS PacMan cart for the 5200 yet, and it's pretty much the only game my wife will play if I coax her into playing a video game.Crosby is a remarkably unremarkable small town in the woods of central Minnesota. I was only there because my mom had been rushed to the Crosby hospital because of severe stomach pain while on vacation.My mom had been having stomach problems since December. The doctors in Florida kept telling her that she had Chrones desease.... whatever that is. But according to the Crosby surgeon, it turns out her appendix had been flaring up since Dec. The last really bad episode of stomach pain she had was about 2 weeks ago.The CT scans had showed nothing, so the Crosby surgeon decided to do exploratory surgery. Luckily for my mom the small town surgeon was formerly an ER trama surgeon at a Minneapolis hospital. Once the guy began the operation he discovered that her appendix had already burst, and he concluded from all the internal damage that it most likely had burst two weeks before at the time of her last pain flare up.I was flabbergasted. I had never heard of anyone lasting more than a day with a ruptured appendix. Apparently, the rupture had caused adhesions that isolated the bile from the rest of her body. This is what apparently kept her from becoming deathly ill before now. However, according to my aunt who is also a surgery nurse, at this point, my mom would have been very close to dying had she not gone to the ER that night. After a couple hours of surgery, the doctor removed the appendix, clensed the area and detatched all of the adhesions.We were very lucky. Since 2000 I've lost both my brother and my father. It seems impossible to me to lose my mom so soon aftward as well. But the surgery has been a success. My mom is recovering nicely. Today, in order to give her some privacy in her hospital room, I slipped out and walked around the antique stores in Crosby. Yeah, MS Pac-Man was probably over priced, but it made me feel good to buy it anyway.Aaron

2 Comments

Recommended Comments

Mezrabad 148

Posted June 13, 2005

Wow. Glad your mom is doing OK. What a scary story!

Quote

Link to comment

atari_aaron 2

Posted June 17, 2005

Thanks for the comment. My mom is doing much better, but we just found out today that she has an infected abscess which needs to be drained. It looks like she'll be in the hospital for several more days. She's past the roughest part, but she's still got a little ways to go.

Aaron