Not the worst pain, but the longest
I really am surprised there haven’t been more childbirth stories here. I haven’t decided if I should post the story of my first child’s birth (comparatively, the second child’s birth was a casual stroll on a spring day), because I’ve noticed that the only people interested in hearing about horrible childbirth stories are only pretending to be interested. They’re waiting for you to shut up so they can tell their childbirth story (because it was so much worse than yours!). Also, my hubby occasionally peruses these boards, and reminding him of the terrible things that happened to one of his favorite playthings may traumatize the poor man all over again. Oh, the scars. Literal and figurative.

So I will tell my appendicitis story, even though several of those have been posted, because mine was so much worse than all of yours.

It happened when I was eleven years old. My step-mother had run off to visit her family for a few weeks, taking the two youngest (her biological children) in our family with her. She and dad may have been having problems at the time. Hindsight tells me ‘of course they were, she fucked off for nearly a month, with a six month old baby!’, but at the time, it just seemed a summer holiday to visit her family. So it was down to Dad, my older sister and myself. Younger brother had gone off to visit with our mom for a few weeks. (Yes, my father is apparently a virile man. Five kids between two women, two of them only five months apart… but that’s a different QOTW. The dysfunctional-ness of my family is legend ‘round these parts.)

I had been having stomach pains for a couple days. Dad kept brushing it off (it’s just a little bug, it’s probably just gas pain, you’re fine, get in there and finish the dishes), until the fourth or fifth day, when I was curled into a ball on the floor, unable to move without bursting into tears.

So dad runs me to the emergency room, telling me the whole time it’s just gas, they’ll give me a little something or other and send me home. They get me in, do a few tests, and tell my father they have to perform the appendectomy immediately, my appendix was going to rupture any minute.

By this time they’d given me a few drugs, and I was quite happy to agree to sniff the funny looking mask and count backwards from ten. I think I managed to say ten before completely passing out. It’s possible I didn’t get that far.

A few hours later I’m waking up, and I’m still on the good drugs. Five days later, I’m still in the hospital, and they’re still giving me a shot in the ass every four hours to keep me quiet because I was hurting so much. The reason I was still hurting: apparently they cut me open, and as soon as the doctor touched my appendix, it burst, spilling pus into all the places in my gut that are not supposed to be exposed to such things. It was so bad, they had to leave the incision open, and every four hours, a nurse would come in, give me a shot, wait a few minutes for it to work, and then squeeze at my stomach as though it were an overripe pimple in need of popping. It was six days before they decided they weren’t going to be able to squeeze out any more, and finally sewed me up. Two more days and I was home, still barely able to move, with severe gut pains which lasted another couple weeks and, believe it or not, permanent nerve damage from all the shots. Twenty-two years later, I still get a twinge of pain if I move wrong, or if hubby smacks the wrong part of my ass.

I managed to miss the first two weeks of school that year. Win! Also, informing your estranged spouse that one of the younglings is having emergency surgery will bring her running home immediately.

Length? 8cm on average, but swollen to nearly twice that.
(ladydyani, Fri 30 Jul 2010, 18:46, Reply)