They Say It’s My Birthday

Content Warning: Body Horror

Anyone who has been following along here or on social media is probably already aware that I have not been feeling 100% for a few months now, at the very least. On Friday, we somewhat abruptly discovered at least part of the reason. After two months (plus) of illness, including various gastrointestinal discomfort, my doctor ordered a CT scan. I went in for the scan expecting to come home right after, but before they performed it they let me know that I would have to wait up to an hour after it was done while they looked at the scan before they sent me home.

Not ten minutes after the scan was completed, someone came out to the lobby and informed me that I was being sent over to the emergency room and, it turned out, from there pretty much directly into surgery. I’m still waiting to get some of the details, but from what I understand my appendix had not burst, as I am led to believe appendixes generally do, but for whatever reason had been rotting inside my body for literally weeks, the necrotic tissue actually sort of gluing parts of my colon together. Which not only explains why I’ve been feeling poorly, but also makes it something of a miracle that I wasn’t doing worse. (This also means that, for the immediate future, that body horror anthology Silvia Moreno-Garcia and I keep half-joking about editing together may hit a little close to home.)

This also neatly solves my conundrum about which of the various movies playing at the theatre now and in the immediate future I’m going to go see. The answer is definitely none of them any time soon.

Surgery was, I gather, pretty serious, and I was under the knife quite a bit longer than is normal for an appendectomy. I spent Friday night in the hospital, and experienced literally the worst pain I have thus far felt in my entire life. I’m home now, and seem to be on the road to recovery, though I imagine that road is probably going to be decently long and more than a little bumpy.

Over the course of Friday and Saturday, a partial list of the indignities visited upon me include three (3) IVs in a single day, two (2) catheters in a single day (which, incidentally, is about five catheters too many), and no less than four different hospital bracelets, for various reasons. I still have a drain to help siphon off some of the unpleasant gunk left over from having a rotting organ in my abdomen for so long.

While this is not exactly how I was hoping to spend my birthday or Halloween, I have a feeling that it’s better than the alternative, and I’m grateful to have at least a partial explanation, finally, for why I’ve been in such bad shape for so long. If I owe anything to anyone, I’ll try to gradually start working through any backlog sometime after the start of November, though I honestly have no idea right now how quickly I’m going to bounce back from this.

Thanks to all the kind wishes from everyone, and to those local folks who have already helped out. I’m afraid that, with Grace recovering from a severe back injury, as well, we may be asking more of you in the future, too. It means more than I can say to have people in my corner at a time like this.

In the meantime, my birthday present to myself this year is, I guess, not being dead yet, which, I gather, might have actually been a possibility for a moment there, and at least seemingly being on the mend, finally, rather than getting worse, even if mending is maybe going to take a pretty long time. As birthday presents go, I’ll take it.