How I didn't die of appendicitis

Happy Groundhog Day! So, apparently we're in for 6 more weeks of winter. :( That's tough to deal with after a sunny, 60 degree day yesterday. Unfortunately, I haven't enjoyed the beautiful weather this weekend due to a bought of pretend appendicitis. Tuesday night I started having abdominal pains, but they weren't bad. Wednesday they got really, really bad, but I still didn't think anything of it, because they weren't on the right-hand side. Boyfriend tried convincing me to go to the doctor, but I've decided I don't really believe in doctors, because they can never figure out what's wrong with me. Thursday, I was still having pains, so I decided to play doctor myself and self-diagnose on www.webmd.com. Behold, the word appendicitis appears when I type in my symptoms. Hmmm...at this point it's midnight and I don't really feel like going to the emergency room, but I have managed to convince myself my appendix will burst and I will die before morning. But I'm lazy, so I attempt to sleep and call my doctor first thing in the morning. Unfortunately, the on-call doctor apparently doesn't exist, as it goes straight to voicemail and he never calls me back. The pain isn't as bad, so I figure I'll just go into work and call the doctor's office when they open to get an appointment. I roll into work at 9, give the doctor a call, and they fit me in at 10:15, so after telling the office I'm dying of appendicitis, I head on out. I was a few minutes late to my appointment, but I figured that was OK. I guess not, because after an hour I still was sitting in the waiting room. Hey, doctors can run late, yeah? After another half hour and the entire waiting room has had a couple of change-overs and I'm the only original person left, I decide to actually ask what's going on. Turns out, the nurse decided to just skip right over me. Awesome. I could be exploding all over the waiting room, but you call that guy with the sniffly nose back. So anyways, the doctor finally sees me and says, yeah, you could possibly have appendicitis, but I don't know. Why don't you go to the ER, because we don't want to deal with you on a Friday. (That's not exactly what she said, but almost). So then I go meet boyfriend at my house and hop in a cab to Sibley hospital.

Digression:
At this point, this is the last ER left in DC that either boyfriend and I have been to. I went to GW for strange stomach problems over a year ago, and it took them 5 hours to get me back, and then they gave me an IV and told me to go to my normal doctor. Boyfriend went to Howard when he had a weird rash and it took him a long time and they never figured out what it was. Sibley is my last bastion of hope in the medical profession.

I was really impressed and highly recommend Sibley. They had me back in a half hour, did all sorts of tests, were very professional, and even though my doctor proclaimed I was a mystery, she did figure out what was wrong with me. After all the blood work and everything came back normal, they finally decided to do a CT scan on me. And let me tell you, that is the coolest thing ever. Boyfriend and I were discussing it, and I told him that in my head, a CT scan is where you go in the tunnel thing. He informs that is an MRI. Good to know. Anyways, it's almost a tunnel thing. It's actually a round donut thing that you go in and out of. At one point, I heard a whirring that got louder and louder like a propeller, and I looked up at a little window thing in the machine and the insides of the machine were spinning around, it was pretty cool.


Anyways, they were able to figure out that my appendix was fine, I just had an ovarian cyst. So now it most likely is harmless, but I still have to go to yet another doctor to have an ultrasound. Yay for health problems! (that was highly sarcastic). But anyways, it's good to know I'm not going to explode, fears of which were not eased by Andrew saying the pictures on wikipedia were gross, as evidenced below.