At this moment, we should be whale watching on a boat off the shore of Cape Breton Island.  Instead, I’m sitting in the basement grimacing in pain and writing this post.  What went wrong?

Friday night, we went out to meet friends and have a few drinks to celebrate the start of our vacation.  Picked up some take out food and went back home so we could be ready to do all the packing on Saturday in preparation for the flight to Halifax on Sunday.  Instead, I came down feeling all upset tummy and pain in my lower abdomen.  Set off for the emergency ward at 5:30am Saturday.  Spent all day being shunted around for test after test while I started to feel worse and worse.  Around 11pm the diagnosis came out – acute appendicitis.   The little bugger was about to pop so it was straight off to surgery.

Woke up in recovery a few hours later with two nurses yelling at me to breathe.  Breathe, I didn’t even know what planet I was on.  They tortured me for an hour more before I was trundled off to the post-recovery ward.  I was there until this morning when they finally sprung me free.

The surgeon told me that the entire wasted piece of flesh was filled with gangrene and could have popped at any time so I guess it’s a good thing that I went in when I did.  I still have a bad infection and they’ve loaded me up with antibiotics that follow the IV they were pumping into me.  The only thing I don’t get to bring home (besides the scummy appendix) is the morphine I got on demand.  That’s one hell of a drug boys and girls and I don’t think the Tylenol is going to get me through the next few days quite as well.

But, what the hell.  I’m walking (sort of).  I’m eating (like a bird).  Hats off to the surgeons, staff and especially the nurses at the William Osler Health Center in Brampton.  It may sound a little melodramatic but, based on how badly I was infected, you saved my life.