So angry. So unhappy. So surrounded my Pepto Bismol.
My most cherished memory of sickness comes from 1994. What a great year. Tonya Harding put Nancy Kerrigan in her place...with a hit man and a crow bar, Schindler's List won the Oscar for Best Picture, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman experienced The Wrath of OJ, and Lisa Marie and Michael Jackson got married. In the sleepy town of Billings, Montana my 6th grade class was playing a rousing game of Around The World!
Around the World is competitive mathematics. It involves everyone sitting at their desks (or, THE WORLD) and one student standing behind each individual--one at a time--and racing that student to the math answer to the question projected onto the white board from the old, clunky projector in the middle of THE WORLD. If the seated student wins he/she takes over as the World Traveler and the game goes on and on and on.
I was not feeling well that day and instead of participating I had decided to lay my head down. Eventually my teacher woke me up. Eventually, as in the game had ended, the lights had been turned on, kids were dragging their desks back to their spots and I was still dead asleep next to the projector.
I ambled home shortly thereafter, informed my parent's that I didn't feel well and went to bed for three days- hoping that my God awful stomach pain would subside. After three days of sleep and little else, I emerged from my cave of a bedroom dehydrated and starving. My stomach felt fine! I was cured! My mom made a bed on the couch for me and I devoured Ramen noodles (always a favorite) and an orange soda. The soda was probably Gatorade, now that I think about it, but whatever it was it tasted like the sweet nectar had only by unicorns, leprechauns and now me.
This joy, this comfort, lasted all of 17 minutes. The Ramen Noodles had been maggots! The orange nectar, poison! My body immediately rejected the feast and I feared that I would never get better. Perhaps I was an alien and could no longer survive in this host body. Maybe tomorrow I would wake up an inchworm, searching for a new pod. I'm pretty sure I had a fever.
At this point, my mom realized that if it turned out I wasn't an alien then surely there was a need to go to the doctor. And so we did. And Dr. Gunville told me within seconds that 1) my appendix had ruptured and 2) I needed to be in surgery yesterday.
This is what I imagine my insides looked like:
It felt exactly like that, too, especially when the doctor made me JUMP. I was in surgery within 10 minutes and my angry appendix was scraped out. And then I got to stay in the hospital for even LONGER because the little trooper infected me.
1994. Definitely a good year! And, magically, I feel so much better now.
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