WobLog

Sarah woke up early Sunday with bad abdominal pain. It came and went, and a lot of the symptoms were consistent with bad gas (more on that later). She and I stayed home from Church, and over the course of the day, there seemed to be a few times when she got a little better, but by evening she clearly was taking a turn for the worse.

Ever since five years ago, when my bout with bad abdominal pain resolved itself via a midnight appendectomy, Lisa and I have been gun-shy when the kids have stomach pain. Thus, we were on the lookout for appendicitis. But as I say, her symptoms were ambiguous. In any event, we decided she needed to see a doctor, and since she only seems to get seriously ill on the weekend, this meant a trip to the emergency room.

I felt a little better when the doctors at the ER were perplexed by her symptoms. She did have bad gas, but she also had (sometimes) localized pain near her appendix. The doctor decided she needed a CT scan to tell one way or the other. By now, it was about 11:00 pm, and the results of the CT scan ended up confirming appendicitis (I'm guessing the gas was caused by her gut shutting down as a result of the appendicitis).

Since our local hospital has a policy of no pediatric surgery, they transfered Sarah to Children's Hospital in Oakland. Around 01:00 Monday morning, she and I piled into an ambulance (first ride in one for both of us), and off we went. By 02:00 we were in a room in the ER at Children's where we spent the next four hours waiting for a slot on the surgery schedule. By 06:00, I'd met with the surgical resident, the attending surgeon, and the anesthesiologist. Then I gave Sarah a hug while they gave her the shot in her IV to start knocking her out, and off she went.

Children's is a terrific hospital that does just about everything they can to make both the kids and their parents comfortable. They gave me a pager so I could leave the waiting area (as long as I stayed in the hospital), and told me they'd page me when she was out of surgery. Since by this time, I hadn't eaten or slept in 12 hours, and since there wasn't much I could do about sleeping, I decided to go to the cafeteria and get some breakfast.

No sooner had I paid for my food and sat down to eat it, then the pager went off (this must have been no later than 06:35). Sarah was in recovery. I wolfed down about half of my breakfast, and then headed up there. Shortly thereafter, I'd talked to the resident and attending surgeons, and the anesthesiologist, who all reported that things went very well (no perforation in the appendix, yay!). Then it was off to post-op to wait for Sarah to wake up. The nurses were very nice, and we chatted for awhile until Sarah started to come to.

Since the hospital was completely full (Really full. As in shuffling patients to try to free up beds), we stayed in post-op about an extra hour. Then it was off to her room, where we got settled in around 09:00 (roughly 14 hours since we'd first left home for the ER in Pleasanton) and waited for Lisa, Alex, and Helen to arrive.

To be continued...