Where Have I Been??

Well it was never my intention to quit blogging totally when Soldier-Boy came home...but we've had a wild ride the last few weeks.  Four days after he came home I woke up feeling a bit "off."  Not terrible, but not 100% either.  I did four hours worth of PCS related errands that day, including mailing a very heavy box, and made dinner, and by the evening I was still not feeling right, so I went to bed early.  It was a long night, with me in increasing amounts of pain but being stubborn and refusing to go to the hospital.  By 6 am on Saturday I was suffering from on-and-off abdominal pain and had a low grade fever.  LSP was still asleep so I drove myself to the local hospital (luckily only 5 minutes away) where, after exams and blood tests and an ultrasound I was diagnosed with appendicitis.  What?!?  I have to say I did not totally believe them.  The pain was coming and going and when it was gone I felt fine.  They scheduled the surgery for a few hours away and Solider-Boy left LSP with a friend and came over.  By two hours before the surgery I was in constant pain and by an hour before I was really suffering and begging them for painkillers or to hurry up and cut me. 

I woke up to discover that I didn't just have appendicitis, I had a very, very infected, perforated appendix.  They had done the surgery laproscopically, and, before the surgery, even given German propensity towards long hospital stays, they had told me to expect to be there for 2-3 days.  Well, all bets were off when they saw the state of my appendix and I spent the next five days in the hospital on two kinds of IV antibiotics with a drain tube.  I've never had that kind of surgery before, and apparently, so they can get a good look inside, they pump you full of air.  Then after the surgery you are left with air pockets that move around your body and I am here to tell you it is incredibly, incredibly painful.  The first night the pain was so bad I was shaking all over - shaking HARD.  Thank God for whatever that was they would put in my IV.  The second night the pain was so bad I was having trouble breathing.  Mmmmm...more painkillers.  It got better after that.  Slowly.  At one point I gasped to the nurse, "I've had two c-sections and this is much WORSE!"  She nodded hard, 'Yes, yes it is," she agreed.  Great.

Did I mention that this all happened on Saturday... three days before the packers arrived to pack up our stuff for our move back to the States?  Poor Bill was left with a 2-year-old who was just getting used to him, a wife in the hospital and an entire house of stuff to get packed up.  Luckily my parents were able to fly in on Monday to help with LSP and with me.  The packing took 3 days and so when I came home I came home to a house empty expect for the government furniture.  I also came home with two more kinds of antibiotics to fight the THREE different awful bacteria in my tummy.

A week after they had come my parent had to leave and I was still hobbling around.  A trip to have my stitches removed revealed that one of the incisions was infected.  Apparently it is where they pull the appendix out of and every surgeon in the hospital was getting great joy telling me, "Well, when an appendix is as badly infected as yours was..."  Seriously, they are practically giddy over the extent of the infection.  They tell me it must have been infected for awhile.  One doctor said, "This pain did not start the day before.  The pain must have stared 5 or 6 days before."  Yum, nope.  I was running and lifting weights and in no pain at all until the day before, and even then it was not so bad until hours before the surgery.

Anyway, now I go every two days to have the infected inscision packed with antibiotic gauze.  Last visit they said it looked better.  Here's hoping.  We are supposed to leave here in a week, a fact I tell them every time I go in.  So that's been my last week.  And in all this chaos I took NO photos.  Not even one of the drain bag, you'll be so sorry to know.  I will try to update more regularly from now on, since, hopefully, I won't have anymore organs removed for awhile.