My date with scrubs

Never in my wildest thoughts would I have thought about a surgery on me – one that has to be performed urgently at that. Well, strange things happen all the time, they say – and I wished it not happened on a Saturday night though.

At first I did not pay proper attention to the sharp pangs in my lower abdomen on that Saturday evening. Since I had to go out with one of my friends to visit another common friend’s casual wear shop. The pain got intense at the shop making the situation embarrassing for me. For I couldn’t stand, sit, or even worse take a look at the clothing line.

Rushing to the nearby hospital, I begged the doctor to give me a shot of painkiller. The painkiller showed its might for another 10 long hours before which I was scanned and diagnosed of having ‘appendicitis’. ‘If the pain subsided you can postpone the surgery till your next attack,’ the doctor suggested. However, as it turned out to be, the effect of the painkiller subsided and my pain reappeared in the wee hours of a Sunday morning.

What followed was a one-hour long surgery inside the operation theatre over the musings and chitter-chatter of the anesthetic, the surgeon and the instructions passed on to the nurses. The anesthetic gossiped about the excess staff of anesthetics in a fellow hospital, the surgeon about the increase in cases of appendicitis and blaming the changing food habits, and the general physician about her independent business.

I was quite sure that none of them were oblivious of the fact that I was still awake. Earlier, before being dissected, I was given a shot of some drug in the spine that made me feel numb from the lower part of my body. It is a strange feeling, I tell ya, to be aware and not have a feeling of your body part being sliced up.

I regained my senses soon after and had to ask the nurses to give another shot of painkiller, this time to kill the pain of being operated. I was under observation for a couple of days after that with only intravenous fluid being injected into my veins.

What followed afterwards was loads of advises, friendly visits by neighbors and friends, and scar with 6 sutures in my lower abdomen. With what started as an acute pain ended up as a scar.

Two days later, when I was shown the specimen that was operated out of my intestine, the nurse said, “It is quite long and would have erupted if you hadn’t been operated at the right time.” Whoa, I didn’t want that to happen.

As I gazed at the curly, white and fleshy thing inside a fluid (formaldehyde?) I thought within - What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.