What's an Appendix for Anyway?

As some of you probably already know, Robert had to have an emergency apendectomy last week.

As long as I have known Robert, he has always had an aversion to certain smells, usually strong perfume, cologne or lotion, and told me that it causes a violent reaction in him where he has terrible pains in his stomach and has to throw up or gets bad gas or a myriad of other nasty problems. We've had to get up and move during church a few times because of this.

Before Christmas, Robert had one of these attacks but as he predicted, the pain went away after a few days and he was fine. And then 2 Sundays ago, he came home from a Stake Priesthood meeting and said that he'd been sitting by a guy who was wearing some stinky cologne and he wasn't feeling very well. He went to bed and got up at the crack of dawn to go to school, so I didn't really get to see how he was doing that morning. I went about doing my stuff and around 2 pm I got a call from him saying he was in severe pain and he was coming home from work. When he got home, he looked bad. He went straight to bed but then started throwing up blood so I made him go to the doctor.

The doctor examined him and said he wasn't sure what was going on because Robert had the signs of appendicitis all except for the pain caused by "the release test." That's where the doctor pushes down where the appendix is and then lets up really fast and it's supposed to hurt like heck. When the doctor did it to Robert, he was like "yeah, that kinda hurts." So, the doctor scheduled Robert for a CT scan the next morning to find out what was happening. He also prescribed Robert something called "GoLytely" in case his pain was caused by constipation. I went to our favorite Walgreen's to pick it up and our favorite pharmacist Jared says, "Um, you're gonna need to come into the store to get this one because it's too big to fit in the drawer," as he is holding up a huge container of what looks like something you'd find in the garden center at Walmart. Robert didn't want to take it, and I don't blame him, so we returned it.

The next morning at the CT scan, we were told to stick around for a little bit so that someone could read the scan. Within a few minutes, a nurse came out and said "you have appendicitis. You need to go to the hospital for surgery right now. We have your doctor on the line." And that was it. He was in surgery within 2 hours.

I've never been so scared in my whole life. I can handle myself needing surgery, but I was really worried about Robert. Thankfully, he, and his appendix came out OK. The surgeon said that it is very rare, but there are people who do have chronic appendicitis. He said that Robert's appendix was just 1 or 2 days away from being gangrenous.

Robert has been recovering pretty well from the surgery. He doesn't really need to take the pain meds anymore, but now he seems to have some nasty sort of infection in his legs and feet. We're not sure if it's from the surgery or secondary to it. He's being treated with antibiotics now and we're really hoping that it's nothing serious.

We also hope that we can stay away from hospitals for a while, unless we're visiting someone who just had a baby or having one ourselves. For as much as we've been at Utah Valley lately, you'd think they'd give us some kind of VIP Parking or at least free drink refills in the cafeteria.