The Lament of My Appendix
My wild emergency appendectomy story and an exciting invite for this week.
^ Listen to this essay here! ^
Darklings! (Shut up, David.)
Pull up a chair and feast your eyes on this bananas story about how I ended up in the ER in the middle of the night two weeks ago, on a hot, humid night in NYC . . . *cue suspenseful music*
I was walking back to the subway after getting a much-needed, luxurious pedicure when my stomach began to tie itself into unfamiliar knots. (Has an opening sentence ever in your life enthralled you more?!) I wondered what I had eaten that was making me feel this way or perhaps what I hadn’t eaten from the of stress of, oh, I don’t know, literally everything.
As the day turned into the evening, the stomachache grew worse and didn’t seem to be revealing itself to be the flu or food poisoning. Strange, I thought. I was alone with our seven-year-old daughter, Marlow, as my husband, David, was out of town doing a stand-up show in some far away city. That night, I put our daughter to bed as fast as I could and went downstairs to take some medication in the hopes it would help alleviate the pain. It didn’t. Near midnight, I texted my friend Dr. Dara Kass (who contributed a beautiful essay in our book, Listening the Dark, about listening to your intuition as an emergency medicine doctor). “You awake?” I texted. She was. I told her what was going on. After a few questions, she said simply, “You need to go to the ER.”
In the taxi ride from Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge to the ER, my stomach pain grew worse. I worried about my daughter. How long would I be in the ER? What if neither David or I were there for Marlow in the morning? Would she punish us by having a cookie for breakfast?! Jokes aside, these kinds of unexpected events are especially stressful for kids, so all of this was a true nightmare for any parent. I texted and called David, but there was a three hour time difference between us, and I knew he wouldn’t see my messages until the morning. Thankfully, our childcare extraordinaire/superhero, Stacy, saved the day and stayed with Marlow.
I checked in to the ER and was put in a hospital bed for several hours before eventually receiving a CAT scan. In the nauseatingly bright fluorescent-lit room, I watched as an elderly rabbi vomited into his own lap, his wife helping to clean him up. Behind a curtain, a cantankerous man with a thick Long Island accent (whose voice sounded as gruff as an uncleaned chimney) hollered and cussed about the snarl of tubes going in and out of his body that made grabbing his cup of water difficult. The lights, the ambience, the pain—my own and that of others—was becoming too much to bear.
An hour later, the nurse who had been doing the rounds made a beeline to my bed and said, “I’ve got good news and bad news for you.“ I held onto my stomach and braced for the worst. “The bad news is you have acute appendicitis, and we’re going to have to do emergency surgery.” I immediately began to cry. “Tah tah tah—wait, now,” she said, consoling me quickly. “Do you want to hear the good news?” I wiped away a useless tear and nodded. She held up a syringe and said, “This is morphine.”
The nurse said that this was all a good thing—that I had something they knew exactly how to treat and that I didn’t need to be in pain while waiting for a hospital room to become available. I had never been on a morphine drip before, but when she screwed the syringe into the cannula in my arm and began to push the medication through, I quickly realized how easy it might be to get addicted to a drug like this. First, my head was warm, then my ear itched, and soon every ounce of pain in my entire body had evaporated, from my weak left shoulder to my out-of-whack back to the sweeping pain in my abdomen that had brought me there to begin with.
Suddenly, the fluorescent lights didn’t seem so jarring. A man rolled by on a gurney with a stab wound in his leg, groaning. You and me both, brother, I thought. You’re a wound . . . I’m a wound . . . We’re all just . . . wounds, walking around or being wheeled through this crazy world. Morphine was dangerously good. It seemed as if even the anxiety of an election year and everything that has come with it had loosened its grip around my mind. Trump Shmump, I thought to myself as I took a full deep breath in (something I realized I had not done in HOURS) and exhaled with a divine yet unfamiliar calm.
After spending five hours in the ER from midnight until five in the morning, I was finally transferred to a hospital room where I promptly fell asleep. Two hours later, I was rudely awoken from my morphine dreamscape by a nurse telling me they had moved my surgery up to 8 a.m., and I needed to get ready as the surgical team would be in shortly to talk to me about the procedure. I tried to call David again, but he didn’t answer. I sent more texts. It soon became clear that I was going to go into emergency surgery without even being able to tell my husband. Who would he re-marry if I died in there? I hoped it would be some older, wise, hot GILF like Jane Fonda. Jane would know what to do with all my loose-leaf poems and writings scattered all over my office, I thought. Jane would NEVER let Marlow get away with a cookie for breakfast.
Minutes later, the door opened and the surgical team walked in: The surgeon was an older woman with gorgeous, long, silver hair and sharp eyes, and she was flanked by two younger women, the anesthesiologist and the nurse. An all-woman team. I burst into tears (again), and the surgeon immediately stepped closer to comfort me. “I just . . . This is all very scary,” I blathered, “and I can’t get ahold of my husband, and I’m worried about my daughter, and you’re all very beautiful, talented women, and we need each other, you know, and I just read J.D. Vance once humped a sectional, and . . . just, morphine.” They nodded their heads and totally understood.
A few hours later, I came out of surgery and was taken back to my room where my dear friend Dr. Dara showed up with exactly the food I wanted at that moment: a bagel with cream cheese and lox. (Prior to this, I had not eaten a single thing in almost 24 hours.) And then, you guessed it! Upon seeing her face, bagel in hand, I cried yet again. David had also finally gotten my messages, canceled his show that night, and was flying home immediately. Marlow was safe and sound with Stacy and most likely not having cookies for breakfast. (Though, at this point, a cookie for breakfast, or at least another bagel, felt well-deserved treat for all involved.) Things were looking up.
It’s now been two weeks since my surgery, and recovery has been slow but steady. In some ways, I’m feeling better than I did before all this started: I’ve been writing again and taking good care of my body and enjoying the last fleeting days of summer before the madness of school begins. (Please enjoy this Instagram video about back-to-school season that had me chuckling.) And tomorrow I’m off on an adventure to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Here’s hoping none of my organs rupture in front of current, former, or future presidents.
Speaking of the DNC! I’ll be posting from the convention all week long here on Substack. For our paid subscribers, I’ll have interviews, insights, videos, and more from the frontlines of the convention—the parties, the panels, the speeches! Today and tomorrow, we’re offering 25% off our annual paid subscriptions, so if you’re interested in supporting this work, accessing past (and future) paid subscriber content, and joining me during this historic week, I hope you’ll consider upgrading. (Jane, if you’re reading this, you get a free lifetime subscription. Call me 😉)
I'd love to read a book about the crazy shit people say as they meet surgeons, are medicated, and about to go under. I always check to see if everyone is sober.
I'm so glad you're okay, Amber, but if you don't mind me asking:
What did Marlow end up having for breakfast that morning?