Taking Down Superman

                I looked down at the Hawaiian Teriyaki chicken surrounded by twenty-seven types of salad situated on my sagging Chinet.  Yuck!  What would have been a typical neighborhood Labor Day feast, didn’t even appeal to my appetite.  Mr. Stomach Knot made sure of that.  I mean, I couldn’t even force myself to try the Italian marinated pheasant or the barbecued elk steaks.  Something was definitely wrong with me, and it wasn’t just indigestion or heartburn.

                My stomach started hurting Sunday afternoon, but at the time I thought it was just hunger pains. For dinner I pounded more than I should have; I had been fasting after all. Then at the Labor Day breakfast that morning, I inhaled enough for three people my size—not bad, but the hash browns tasted like cardboard. I assumed that my pain was an exorbitant amount of carbs nestled in my belly, so I tried everything I could think of to rid myself of that burden, but it refused to budge.

                You can ask anyone who knows me: my pain tolerance is pretty high; but this was an ache like nothing I had ever experienced. It was as if someone was literally grabbing my guts and wringing them from the inside. And although I hurt, I didn’t feel extremely sick, though I tried to force my body to give up whatever remained on the inside. As I knelt on the cold tile of the bathroom floor my geeky English teacher nature cringed even more because I couldn’t come up with one single simile or metaphor to accurately describe my anguish. All that came out, literally, had been hyperbole.

                Bent double over the porcelain at my parents’ house, I hid from the overloaded smorgasbord outside and the curious, well-intending neighbors asking if I felt all right. I didn’t want to see anyone let alone strike up a superficial conversation.

Alone for the moment, I mused: a new thought burrowed into my thick skull and nestled into my brain: where I had previously thought that nothing could stop me, this Superman just got hit by a truckload of Kryptonite; some extraterrestrial substance had brought me to my knees. I’m not sure if you want to call on Karma, hubris, or just gold ol’ irony, but just the previous week I had bragged to my students that I never missed school. I had only missed one day of work due to illness in my life, and that had been in college when I commanded the back of the house at Brick Oven. I only missed eight days of school (from illness) from Kindergarten all the way through graduation. I did not want to get a sub, especially since missing a day as a teacher requires more effort to prepare for and clean up after a substitute, no matter how good she is. So I tried to walk it off, rub some dirt on it, take two Tylenol, and see what the morning would bring.

Sometime between two and three o’clock the next morning, my body popped itself out of bed, not even my usual sloth-like roll out. It was toaster-action popping.

“My appendix,” my brain tried to tell me. I don’t know where the thought materialized from, but immediately I knew that that spindly, superfluous organ was the cause of all my pain. I trudged downstairs to the almighty Internet to confirm my suspicions. Yep. Well…maybe. There were about 47 different possible prognoses with my symptoms according to Web MD. But somehow I knew it was my appendix. Just to be sure I wasn’t fooling myself, I read Amy’s big, thick, how-to-treat-yourself/ home remedy thingy book.  It said to go to the hospital.  Duh!  I already figured that out.

So I typed up some simple lesson plans—students were to read “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell—and emailed them to a colleague, knowing I was not showing up that Tuesday morning.

I then showered and got dressed before I woke up my wife. When she saw me standing there, she knew something was wrong.

“Provo or Payson?” she asked simply, knowing that when I request to go to the emergency room, something was seriously wrong.

We quickly bundled the kids into the car and headed north. She drove me to UVRMC, where she dropped me off so she could take the kids to Carol’s while I was examined and such.

                The triage nurse was unbusy, so it took no time at all to get me in. The actual nurse was pretty ditsy, and I remember thinking, “Great! I’m stuck with her?” She flirted with just about every male nurse or doctor in the joint.  I was placed in an isolated part of the ER where they were making a few renovations.  I don’t think they were staffed properly; it took a little while for anyone to even remember that I was there. Then Ditsy nurse led me to a room the size of a cubicle and gave me a hospital gown, something I had never put on my body before then, so it took me a while to figure out. And when I finally did, the faded pastel print cotton was almost long enough to cover my nether regions, so she had to bring another—an actual adult size.

                Somewhere between thirty and three hundred minutes later Ditsy brought me this sick, chalky, supposedly mint flavored milky garbage to drink.  I think the thick, white goo was supposed to act as a painkiller and check for ulcers or something like that, but I’m not entirely sure. Maybe it was a SuperTums! All I know is that it was like trying to gag down liquid Styrofoam or coagulated Elmer’s glue.

At this point, I guess the insurance finally cleared or maybe an actual non-flirty, non-ditsy nurse came on shift and paid attention to her patients, but I was able to get an x-ray. I was CT-scanned, too.  All the preliminary tests came back negative; finally a think tank of eleven or so medical personnel decided that my appendix was about to rupture. Duh. I could have told them that when I first arrived, but what does the patient know?

Surgery was imminent.

“I guess I’ll need a sub for tomorrow, too,” I joked with my wife and dad, who had sat with me for an hour or six.

The rest of that day was a blur except one distinct memory. I was shuffled onto an icy metal table-bed thing after I had taken out my contacts before being wheeled into the OR. Once through the doors, a hive of green-scrubbed surgeons and assistants teemed about, prepping instruments, reading charts; a couple even jammed to the radio. I knew that they weren’t going to do much slicing, that my appendectomy was going to be performed laparoscopically, but my mortality, the frailness of my flesh, began to make itself manifest in my mind. I was no longer invincible. Superman had met his match. Tuesday, September 7, 2004, would go down in infamy as the first surgery I remember, my first hospital stay since infancy. A small, pencil-shaped blob that had swelled to the diameter of a toilet paper tube had called out my invincibility.

With these thoughts swimming, a trio of nondescript masks surrounded my head, and one doctor slipped the anesthesia mask over my mouth and nose. Another had me start counting backwards. I knew I would never make it to zero, but as I started sliding into La-La Land, one of the assistants from across the room shouted, “Hey, Boss, listen to this.”

I heard Nickelback wail from the crackling speakers, “Something’s gotta go wrong ‘cause I’m feelin’ way too damn good!”

Like I said, I don’t remember conking out, but I do remember chuckling to myself and contemplating the irony of the lyrics.