I survived the typhoon (and the hospital)

Well, it all started on my birthday.

...scalpel...

I had a terrific birthday dim-sum lunch that my co-teachers Winnie and Sunny took me out to and I thought I just ate too much, which I did. After lunch, we all headed over to the bureau of education headquarters to have our bi-weekly fulbright workshop with all the american and taiwanese english teachers. This was ok. Afterwards at about 4pm, I started having severe pain in my abdomen,
it would radiate around to my back, up to my heart, all over the place. I think it's the worst pain I've ever been in, but I can't say for sure. 

I tried sticking it out for Chinese class at 6pm, but left early and tried to sleep some of it off, but by 9pm, it was clear that I wasn't really improving, so I made the call to head to the hospital. 

impressive

After getting to the ER and getting prodded by an extremely efficient Taiwanese ER doc, I was diagnosed with appendicitis. I was SO relieved, I was really worried about having to pass some kidney stones or something, I had no idea what my pain was doing at that point, and feared the worst. I ended up needing a CT scan to confirm my condition, and after the CT scan, it was obvious that my appendix needed to be removed. 

I finally got in to surgery about 1 am Thursday morning and produced, so they say, a wicked infected appendix. My surgery resident was so jazzed about it, he kept saying it really looked like a dumpling. 

Post surgery, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Paul, my roommate had been checked in to the hospital as well. (pleased to have company, but sympathetic of course, to Paul's illness)

Right when I woke up post op.

Sadly, what i had hoped to be a routine appendix removal, recuperation and recovery turned a tad for the worse. Three days post surgery, finding myself sill holding having some awful high fevers (highest was 40C) and a lot of pain it became pretty apparent that something was amiss. Thank goodness I was in contact with my parents every step of the way. It was at this point that Dr. Maples came in to the picture, arriving in Taiwan on Saturday morning. 

It turned out that I was somewhere between regular appendicitis and a burst appendix, where my appendix hadn't ruptured, but there was still danger of infection forming an abscess in my abdomen. I had a drain put into me to try to pull this out, but it wasn't getting everywhere that it needed to be, so I basically just had to get my antibiotics changed and wait it out while my body did its thing. 

My drainage tube, my 小朋友（little friend）

Now, I'm out of the hospital, eating again, oh yeah, I didn't really eat anything except a cookie from Grandma in those 7 days in the hospital, and feeling much more energetic and in high spirits. 

Also, there was the biggest rain fall in Kaohsiung that the city had seen in about 30 years. I can't share much of the typhoon, I was tucked away in the fortress hospital, but it rained about 30 inches in 24 hours, which is almost 4x as much water as Yakima gets in a year. Watch out for late season typhoons, they're intense!