Well, I suppose this story begins on Sunday night. After dinner, around 6PM, my stomach started hurting pretty badly, badly enough that I asked Erin to wash my dishes because I didn’t think I could make it. So I went to lie down, and after about 10 minutes, I got nervous that I was going to be sick. So I ran to the bathroom and sat on the floor for a while until the feeling had subsided a bit. At that point, I got Erin and had her sit with me in the bathroom. Just to give you an idea of how bad I was feeling, Erin was so disgusted by the bathroom floor that she just kept asking me to get up because it was so bad (the hostel bathrooms don’t get cleaned very often… or maybe ever, we’re not sure)
Anyway, a few minutes and antacids later, I started to feel a bit better, and went with Erin to her room and a few of us just talked and relaxed for a while. But the worst wasn’t over - - and as my stomach pain started to return around 9PM, I decided I didn’t want to stay awake any longer, so I took 2 Tylenol PMs in hopes of just “sleeping it off”.
Sadly, an hour later, I woke up in even worse pain, just constant shooting pains in my stomach. I went back to the filthy, yet somehow comforting bathroom floor (comforting maybe only because I knew if I did get sick, I was in the best possible place), and waited it out again. I returned to bed hoping that this would be the last of it.
Then, this whole process happened 2 more times. Sleep, waking, pain, bathroom floor, disgust with bathroom floor, not caring about how gross it was because I just felt so bad, returning to bed, and repeat.
The final time, I decided I couldn’t take it anymore (and was pretty scared that something was actually wrong), so I went downstairs to the reception to see what time it was. Completely expecting it to be 5AM after all of the turmoil, to my disappointment it was only 1:40AM. Knowing that I couldn’t make it the whole night through repeating this process, I went to the staff apartment to try to wake Craig & Jen to take me to the hospital.
So I knocked… and I knocked… and there was no answer (their room is set off from the hallway door, so they couldn’t hear me). So there I am, in terrible pain, 2AM, desperate, and I just decided I wanted to lie down. Right there. In the hallway. Mind you, I’ve never seen anyone vacuum that hallway. But I didn’t care. As I was contemplating my next plan of action, something amazing started to happen. The pain started to go away, just enough to motivate me to get up and go to bed, for the 4th time. And by some miracle, this time I slept through the night.
I woke up still feeling a bit uneasy, but MUCH better. When I told the students & staff that next day, people still seemed pretty concerned, and Mikkel, one of the students who just graduated from medical school, asked to examine me. So we did that, and through the course of his examination, he became concerned because the pain I was having & the location of the pain was indicative of appendicitis. So – he said he recommended that I go to the doctor… RIGHT then. I will admit I was pretty much totally freaked out at this point.
But we walked, in the rain, to a little clinic here, and the doctor there felt pretty confidently that I was okay, because I had started to feel better, which doesn’t generally happen with appendicitis. So he told me to just monitor it throughout the day and come back if it got worse. And although I was deathly afraid that my appendix was just going to rupture at any moment, it didn’t! and I feel absolutely fine now! So basically it was the biggest fluke stomach pain ever, and I am officially attributing it to the broccoli I ate Sunday night (I remember a time in high school when I ate a good amount of broccoli and felt really sick, so I am thinking maybe there’s something in broccoli that my body can’t handle in large quantities). Anyway, I am fully recovered. And I have a crazy story to tell. So I hope you enjoyed it!
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