My Cousin's Appendix

I’ve typically thought of appendixes as scary little beasts. A container for culturing bacteria in the human’s lower gastric system (bio majors out there, feel free to correct me or add enlightenment via the comments), if it gets destabilized it goes into critical mode and erupts inside the abdomen, spewing said bacteria into the vulnerable bodily systems. I guess it is no more volatile that any other body part, but the seemingly fickle attitude that some appendixes have with regard to their vital duty disturbs me.

My opinion was not improved when my cousin had his appendix removed last year. I was in a friend’s dorm room playing Call of Duty when my phone rang. My cousin calls all the time so I was not really concerned. I ducked my British Special Forces troop behind a heavy-looking crate and picked up.

“Yeah, what up?”

“Hey, listen I think I have Appendicitis.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, I’m at the campus clinic and in a lot of pain. You wanna come to the hospital with me?”

I was taken aback and I stammered some kind of rebuttal and wished him luck before handing up and exiting the game before me. Appendicitis, really? Wasn’t that sort of deadly? What was I supposed to do, anyway? Better to stay behind and say a prayer on his behalf rather than get in everybody’s way.

No.

I called him back and asked if anything had changed. No. Where was he? Same place, getting ready to drive to the hospital. Okay, but wait for me, I was on my way.

After donning my street clothes and filling a bag with homework and casual reading, I marched down to the clinic and found my cousin outside, leaning against a pillar in the covered breezeway. We grinned and exchanged nods – none of the usual rough greetings – and he informed me that his wife was on her way. They were planning on going home, packing up, and heading out pronto. She arrived and we bundled into the car to go to their house where my cousin snatched a few papers and kissed his wife goodbye. Now that I was on board, there was a new plan: I would drive to the hospital with cousin riding shotgun and wife would follow with supplies enough to make it through the night if necessary.

I’ve never driven so fast in my life. To date I had driven my Mom’s 1987 Volvo at a top speed of seventy miles-an-hour when I lost track of my speed. With my gut-busting cousin unbuckled and reclined beside me, I topped out somewhere between eighty and ninety, cutting off Mack trucks and taking exits when they were right on my bumper. We whipped into the emergency room drop zone and cousin marched briskly inside while I sought out the parking deck. Well, things must not have been too bad because by the time I made it into the emergency room the nurse was only taking his blood pressure. After a short wait my cousin was stripped and laid on a mobile bed to await surgery.

At that point I learned a little more about appendectomies. Apparently if caught in time, the doctors make no rush out of the procedure. My cousin was left in his place for several hours, visited only by his wife – lugging several duffle bags full of clothes and food – and a nurse who proffered some papers granting the doctors permission to perform surgery. That document was signed at once but no doctor bothered show up for another couple hours. About five hours after admission, roughly six or seven since I received the phone call, my cousin was wheeled away into surgery and I joined his wife in the waiting room.

It was loud and crowded and entirely unpleasant, but in a little while my aunt and uncle arrived with my cousin’s grandmother and we all hugged before moving to another, plushier waiting room where we waited out the surgery. It was done in short order so that about eight or nine hours after the phone call he was coming out of the drug-induced sleep and was allowed a few visitors. I was allowed to leave in his car with a few Burger King coupons in hand, though I struggled for about ten minutes to disable the car alarm, dodging wary cops and rediscovering how to use an automatic.

After the surgery, my cousin was allowed to come home, but was excused from work and school. Fearing lest he injure himself, his wife requested that I stay with him during her work hours that week. I didn’t mind, there was Xbox.