What was that all about?

Last Friday morning (May 21st), I woke up feeling fine...

How's that for an ominous opening?

I sat up in bed for my usual morning 30-minute meditation. And felt a little unusual in my lower abdomen. Didn't hurt or anything, just felt a bit... well, unusual. This was around 6:30 AM.

By 9:00 that morning, the feeling was still there. I had been hoping that it would subside and go away once I got up, dressed, and moving about. No such luck.

I had planned a "walking tour" of West Chester, stopping at our accountant's office, the post office, the bank, our Quaker Meeting and the Quaker School; and got the trip underway by 9:30 or so. By 10:15, the feeling had turned from "unusual" to mildly painful.

And by 11:00 or so, the pain was severe enough that I had to stop my peregrinations several times to wait for the pain to let up. At times, I thought about just sitting down somewhere and calling Deb to come and rescue me. By this time, I was pretty sure that I was suffering from appendicitis.

I managed to get home and call my family doctor with a "Should I stop to see you or just go straight to the Emergency Room at Chester County Hospital?" Luckily for me, our favorite Physician's Assistant had an opening in her schedule at 2:15. (Why do these things always happen on Friday afternoons or during the weekend? Is this just a corollary to Murphy's Law?)

Our PA had me lie on the examination table and pull up my shirt so she could probe the area where the pain was located. She barely put her hands on my abdomen when I asked her please not to press so hard. She confirmed to Deb and me that the area in question was exactly where the appendix was located.

Whoopee.

(Want to know where that pain spot is? Just in case you have a similar issue? Well, you draw a line between your belly button and your right hip bone. And halfway in between is where the pain is most likely to show up. The PA told us this. And now you know as well!)

She made a couple of lightning-quick phone calls and cleared me to be seen by the hospital's Radiology Department for a CAT scan -- if we could get to the hospital in less than 15 minutes. Because, of course, the Radiology Department was getting ready to close up for the weekend. (That's 15 minutes which, of course, included the time we needed to check out of the Family Doc's office. Geez...)

Deb had driven us over to the doc's office, since I might experience another pain episode while driving. Since the timing was critical, I thought about gently moving her out of the driver's seat with a "Let me handle this one, honey" but thought better of it. Deb's a very good driver, if somewhat more cautious than I am.

But I restrained myself from this clearly chauvinist act -- and was glad I did. Deb did a masterful piece of driving to the hospital (not NASCAR crazy, mind you, but agile and rapid), and we made it with several minutes to spare.

Minutes that were taken up signing in. As in "Do you have your driver's license and proof of insurance with you, Mr. Lyons?" Double Geez...

Anyway, we were just in time. Time to sit in the Radiology Waiting Room for a half hour or so. Before they handed me the barium drink that I needed to take. Then wait an hour or so while the barium circulated in my system to wherever it had to go. And then... another dose of barium and another wait. Triple Geez...

I finally got the CAT scan, the results of which were sent via Internet to the examining doctor and his analysis sent back the same way, I was amazed but very pleased to be informed that my appendix was perfectly fine. And, other than some gallstones I didn't know I had, everything else was pretty normal.

(Now, I want to report at this point that Deb and I are getting to be old hands at hanging around in hospitals -- one thing and another. We each took books along to read. Books that had lots of pages to read. Books that would take a lot of time to read. Books that would keep our interest for long periods of time. I was particularly fortunate that my golfing buddy had loaned me a Swedish murder mystery that was over 600 pages long. Perfect!)

So the question became, "Okay, if Randy's appendix is in good shape, what's causing the pain?"

Which led to a series of blood tests and a sonogram. (The sonogram, it seems, will show up things like inflammation that might not show up in a CAT scan. Inflammation, for example of the gall bladder. Where the newly found gallstones are located. You see? You learn something new every day! "What are sonograms good for?" someone may ask you sometime. And now you have an answer!)

All of this took quite a long time. Part of it was a simple mistaken identity: I had a bandage on the inside of my right elbow where the CAT scan technician had injected the tracing dye. And my chart in the ER said I should have a blood sample drawn. And the folks running the ER looked at my arm from a distance and assumed that the right-elbow bandage meant that I had already had the blood sample drawn. (See how these things happen? Anyone could have made that mistake...)

When I finally asked someone about having the blood drawn, the mistake became apparent and, with apologies, the requisite blood was taken. But then my mistake showed up: by this time, I had forgotten to mention to anyone that I was on blood thinners. So there was no special pressure applied to my just-installed left-elbow bandage. And 30 seconds after the bandage was applied, it was soaked with blood and leaking out onto the rest of my arm.

As I walked -- gingerly -- back into the Nurse's office where the blood had been taken, she looked up at me and my increasingly red arm and asked: "What, are you on Coumadin or something?" Clever lady! (How many "Geez"es are we up to now? Four? Five?) So we discarded the soaked bandage and applied a new one -- with considerable pressure for a considerable amount of time.

Well, the blood tests came back completely normal, and the sonogram showed no inflammation of the gall bladder (where the aforementioned stones are located) or anything else in the abdominal cavity.

By this time, it was well after 10:00 PM. And there had been dozens of people through the ER. It seems I'm only one of many who experience medical emergencies on Friday afternoon and evening. Making it increasingly likely that Murphy is responsible for this timing.

However! I had not had an attack of the pain for several hours. And the tenderness in my abdominal area was significantly lessened.

So I felt comfortable in going home. No, make that grateful for going home, as I had been firmly convinced that I would be spending a day or two as an in-patient at the hospital -- following my surgery for appendicitis -- when we initially left the house to go to the doc's office that afternoon.

Actually, "grateful" isn't quite strong enough to express how I felt. I just don't know a word that's stronger.

Grateful. Grateful. Grateful.

We got home after 11:30 that night. Delighted with the outcome of the day's activities. Yeah, that's good. "Delighted." And grateful.

Deb and I had scheduled a weekend away from home at a local Retreat Center that was to start on Friday evening. And we felt comfortable in going to the Center around noon on Saturday. We're now back from that. And it was a wonderful time away. And all the more wonderful because of the events of Friday.

So what were those pain episodes all about? We still don't know. The best anyone could come up with was constipation. Which is possible, I guess, but doesn't strike me as being likely.

I'll schedule a follow-up appointment with our PA on Monday. And let you know if anything else happens.