Well, the past few days have been horrible. Sunday night after I got home from work I started to have some pain in my side, but as I have a bad back I did not think anything about it. I continued to grade papers, but as the night went on the pain increased. Then came the vomiting. Then I realized it was time to go to the ER. While in the hospital lobby I continued to vomit, which is always fun to do in public, and was eventually seen (hospitals are still overcrowded these days and so even going to the ER takes a lot of time to be seen by a doctor) by an ER doctor who thought it was going to be an appendicitis. I was thinking appendicitis too. But the CAT scan showed that it was a Spigelian hernia and about a grapefruit-size of my intestines was going through the rip in the abdominal wall. The hospital I was in is small and they really don’t do surgery there anymore (no I did not know that when I went there), so I was transferred to another larger hospital via ambulance at 1:30am and was told that I would have to wait until later in the morning to have surgery. Eventually, I had surgery around 9am on Monday. So lots of horrific pain, followed by surgery, and now recovery pain. I was released Tuesday night at 8:30pm, as the hospital releases people at any time because they need the beds. I am now home! Recovery will be a few weeks at home and a 6-week weight/lifting restriction of 15 pounds. Thankfully I have been getting lots of help from friends and relatives and am on the road to recovery.
Photos: notice the large bulge at the top where an abdominal wall should be on the CAT scan. Flowers from the very kind people in the library. Draining the fluids inside the surgical area.
