Holiday Apendicitis

Today is the three month anniversary of my arrival in Japan and I can honestly say that I’ve changed a great deal. However, an update on my personal realizations and epiphanies will have to wait until another time. This story I suppose starts in a strange way but I think this is the only way to tell it. It ends up with me in the hospital.

Background: I arrived in Japan weighing in at 202lbs (91.5kg). Over the last three months I’ve gotten my weight down to 187lbs (84.8kg). A few of them dropped off within the first few weeks because of how much we were moving around. Japanese food is very good for losing weight. On top of that, I’ve been keeping a steady gym schedule of three visits a week. Lastly, Helene and I have been reading a lot on healthy eating and toxins and a few other ideas about eating practices have come up but, nonetheless, I’ve curbed my eating style to include more fruit than ever before. All this accounts for my weight loss. I don’t remember when my weight was this low. It must have been in High School.

Cause: Last Thursday, I went out to dinner with a few of my students. I recommended that we go to a German restaurant. (Regardless of what happened, German food is still my favourite.) Without unnecessary detail we ate a lot of food and, for those of you not in the know, German food is heavy on the system. I’m pretty sure that the bingeing I did that night heavily affected my situation, maybe it even was the cause.

Effect: On Saturday evening after a great day of shopping and exploring the city, I came home dizzy and a little nauseous. I fell asleep fairly early without much dinner and woke up the next day, at 1:30pm with a strong fever, stomach pain and back pain. I felt awful, the smell of food just made me sick. Couldn’t do anything but watch TV (SHARK- An excellent lawyer show with James Woods, only went for two seasons but I really like it). Fell asleep again at 8pm with lots of clothes and a hot water bottle. Woke up the next day, Monday, with a crazy headache and back pain like nothing I’ve ever felt before. My neck was so stiff that it hurt to move it in any way. After some stretching and drugs, I honestly felt strong enough to go to work. I thought that if I really felt bad I would go home. Everything sucked but it was tolerable.

Pain: The lower abdominal pain and back pain lasted for the rest of the week with a little fever. I have two doctors that I teach every Tuesday and they said that if the pain got worse I should go to the hospital. Well it did and on Wednesday night I went to a Japanese Hospital. It turns out that I was suffering from appendicitis. They gave me some anti-inflammatory drugs intravenously and, when I was done, told me to go home and come back if I wasn’t feeling completely better. The next day I came back feeling a little better and they gave me a prescription for more antibiotics and told me to come back if it got worse.

Moral: No I don’t regret eating all that delicious German food. What I learned was that, if I did the macho thing and dealt with the pain without going to the Hospital which I was persuaded to do (actually, my girlfriend force-marched me there!), then I probably would be going in for surgery right now. See, an appendix infection doesn’t actually hurt that much. All the secondary symptoms seemed unrelated but it worked something like this: The infection slowly started to infect my kidney which caused my lower back pain, leading to my neck jamming up that caused my intense headaches. The neck would keep jamming up even though I massaged it out. I honestly thought that the abdominal pain would pass.

Don’t screw around with the appendix It may not do anything to help you, but if it gets infected it can mess you up!