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No fewer than eight women saw my penis today.

I woke up Wednesday morning with some funky pain in my lower-right abdomen. It was pretty dull for most of the day, but by lunch time, it was heading more towards the moderate range. I remembered from the episode of Full House when Uncle Jesse and Aunt Rachel’s twins were born that this was a symptom of appendicitis, so, getting a little concerned, I did some quick research on Wikipedia, which is always infallible, obviously, and with enough knowledge to make me a de facto authority on the issue, practically an M.D., I diagnosed myself with an affliction of that useless one-inch piece of flesh that fulfills a vestigial-at-best role in digestion and the immune system.

That afternoon, I called a doctor’s office, which was closed. I left a message. The next morning, the office called me back and told me that the doctor was on vacation, so they referred me to another doctor. That one was on vacation, too, so I got one more referral, and that third doctor told me over the phone to go to the Emergency Room. He didn’t actually call me stupid, but five bucks will get you ten that he muttered it under his breath after hanging up.

I went home to pack a bag. Change of clothes, laptop, Gameboy, DS, PocketPC, DVDs, toothbrush: all of the amenities of home. I got in the car, and made my way to what would turn out to be the smallest emergency room in all of Creation. The wait was Methuselean.

At one point, some crazy lady walked up to me and started spelling the word “intelligent” at me. To be fair, she spelled it correctly, so I was at least a little impressed, but still, here I am, the most pedantic and arrogant writer ever begotten by the human reproductive cycle, being told how to spell something. Then, she fell on the floor and started crying and farting. I went to the bathroom instead.

The person who used the bathroom before me was a fat lady, and she had pooped. Girl poop already smells worse than the real kind, but fat girl poop effuses an offensiveness normally reserved for outhouses in Mordor. I tried to be quick about it, but I had to poop, too.

Evacuation complete, I went back to the waiting room. After a short, four hour wait, I was told to wait for two hours while the barium sulfate I just drank made me radioactive and gave me diarrhea. They also took some blood, which I always hate, but then they took some urine, too, and I love peeing, so it was okay. Took my pants off, got a CAT scan, put my pants back on.

At this time, I would like to point out that typing with an IV line sticking out of the back of your hand is very uncomfortable.

After waiting for another couple of hours, the physician came to visit me at the bed in the hallway - the hallway - that they had set up for me, and told me that it was probably appendicitis. I knew that already. Another half-hour later, a surgeon came by to tell me the same thing. I still knew that already. And then, he said that I was heading in to surgery right away. “Oh, okay, cool, wait, what?” I said to him, as if there was a cure for appendicitis that didn’t involve surgery. He consoled me by informing me that I would probably need to take about a two-week medical leave from work. That made me smile, and I told him to hurry up and cut me open, then, or I would just do it myself. I bet I could do it. I watch Scrubs every week. I really did tell him that.

I’d been put under before, back when I had my wisdom teeth out, but this time was different. When I got my wisdom teeth done, the sensation was such that one moment, I was wide awake and alert, and the next moment, I felt like I had just quaffed a gallon of porter, which had caused my wisdom teeth to pop out of my head and fill my mouth with blood. This time, it was more that one moment, I was wide awake and alert, and the next moment, I was wide awake and alert again, only now I had three holes in my belly, quite a bit less body hair, and a cute nurse greeting me. I asked her for her phone number, but she seemed to think I was either joking or delirious.

I soon became pretty sore. My urethra was blocked off, so I was peeing like I had a marble jammed in my peeder, even when my bladder was painfully swollen with sweet, sweet tinkle. The incisions hurt like crazy, and the pain that had originally been focused on my appendix was now encompassing my entire lower-abdomen region, which I figured was because my appendix was no longer there. I was not a happy dude.

So they gave me a morphine button, a button for morphine, by which I mean, I push this wonderful button, and I get a shot of morphine. A morphine button.

Awesome.

Wheeeeeeee.

Hlk… holk… wuhlaugh! …gasp…

It is hard to write good onomatopoeia for the act of vomiting. I stopped pressing the amazing morphine button.

Soon after that, I was told that I had to pee on my own within the next hour, or they were going to perform the most dreadful of medical procedures: a catheter in my ding dong. The tension was unbearable. I would stand in front of the toilet for twenty minutes at a time, bend over, throw up, and get right back up again to keep trying. I managed to convince the doctor to give me several extensions to my deadline, and finally, four hours later, at about 8am, my bladder released its fury in a hurricane of orange-ish glory. Whew. I threw up again to celebrate.

The surgeon came by just now, as I was writing, to tell me about the operation. He said that a piece of the fatty layer under my lower-right abdomen (shut up, I’m not fat, seriously, shut the hell up, that’s not funny, *sob*) had gotten twisted up, causing it to become gangrinous and infected, and that infection was starting to move to my appendix, so he took the twisted chunk out along with the appendix.

You might notice that I’m writing in present tense now.

So the deal now is that I have to get a meal down and keep it there, and then they’ll let me go home. So, I just asked for a liquid meal, and received a bowl of soup, some pudding, milk, tea, and juice. Right now, I’m working on the soup, and I think it might actually be gravy. At any rate, it’s staying down, which means I get to go home soon, which is fortunate, because I already told my sister to come and get me.

I’m at home now, getting ready to enjoy two weeks off from work. From this day forward, I am missing a chunk of fat from under my abdomen, in addition to an evolutionarily leftover piece of intestine. Not as cool as losing the top two bones of a finger, because it’s hilarious to stick the stub in your nose so it looks like you’ve got your whole finger up there, but I’ll take what I can get.

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