Snot Bag

Yeah, it's been more than 2 days. Oh well, you'll see why in a minute.

Friday morning I took Bean to PFLC at the kids school and I started getting a pain on my right side. I tried sitting down, standing up, leaning on things, drinking, eating, etc. and it just would not go away. At 12:30 Bean went to daycare, so I went to the ER because it was pretty bad by that point. I'm fine, kind of, but the ER is certainly an adventure.

When I got there, I had to wait for the triage nurse to be free and ready to help me, while I got to observe all the insanity that is the ER in our hospital. Just before I got there, apparently some guy had walked in with a cup of something (whether it was coffee, tea, juice or urine, I don't know, and don't really want to), looked at the volunteers at the information desk and poured whatever was in the cup onto the floor. They were not impressed.

Shortly after I got there, a young man, maybe late teens or early twenties, came in with his mother. His mother was complaining about how long it was taking, how the nurses are really slow, basically everyone not dropping everything and catering to her and her son. It was annoying, especially since they were right beside me. She complained louder when a woman came in that couldn't breathe and had already passed out once on the way to the hospital. That woman got in to see the nurse first. I wasn't surprised, I may have been in pain, but at least I could breathe.

Then the fashion show started. We had the people with too small overalls (never a good look), with flannel shirts over it, and no shirt under, or the woman who wore pajama pants that were threadbare and too tight, with a shirt that definitely didn't even begin to cover her protruding belly and the housecoat. I felt very overdressed in my jeans and t-shirt. I never thought that would happen.

While sitting with the triage nurse, some guy came in with his wife with a stool sample and didn't know where to bring it. Then he started arguing with the nurses about it. One of them told me that she was going home and having 10 drinks, not just one, two or three, 10. She doesn't want to have to deal with poop, literally. Another told me that she still had 4 hours left of her shift and she was ready to be done. I guess it had been like that the entire day.

After seeing the triage nurse, I got in a room pretty quick. They were afraid that I had appendicitis. The only room left was the one that they put the violent patients in. How do I know this? There was no window, the door was able to be locked with a keypad on the outside, and there were huge gouges in the wall, door, heater, and floor. Most of them looked like footprints, but some of them looked like something with wheels had gone through the wall. I even had a door with a little window on it, kind of like a jail cell, I guess so people could see if I was done being crazy??

I got to see the doctor, I got my blood taken by crazy vampires, and still have the bruise to prove it, and then I got to go have an abdominal ultrasound. In case you were wondering, it hurts when they do an ultrasound through your ribs. I'm still tender, and it's 2 days later. I found out that I'm not pregnant, an IUD will do that to you, everything is normal but my appendix, which has a bag of snot in it. And a stone that is rolling around and occasionally causes a blockage. My appendix apparently looks weird too, it took the ultrasound tech and the radiologist to figure out if what they were looking at was really my appendix. That's comforting.

So now I get to wait and see if the snot bag that is my appendix is going to become a problem. Which is nice. I could have waited a few more hours for a CT scan, but I had already been there 5 or 6 hours and just wanted to go home. For some reason the hospital makes me want to go to sleep and I spent most of the time there trying not to. The ER doctor also told me what to look for, and that I didn't really have any of the signs of appendicitis so she felt safe sending me home.

And now I get to try to sneak some of the pancakes that I spent way too long making. I'm pretty sure my kids don't breathe when they eat.