Thank God for student health insurance!

First and foremost, I apologize if there are any spelling errors in this blog as I am a little loopy. Here's why:

It was Tuesday night and I was watching the end of The Andy Griffith Show and my stomach started to hurt. I told my father-in-law that I ate too much, too quickly for dinner and was thinking that maybe a piece of bread (i.e. bagel) would sop up any yucky stomach acid I may have had.

After eating the bagel, the pain then moved into my intestines. I'd get a sharp pain in the "upper left" portion of the intestines followed by a "squishy" sound that would relieve the pain... for about 5 seconds. This continued over the next hour and a half, where it was then replaced by severe pain throughout my instestines and an occasional sharp pain.

This new pain would go on for the next 2 hours and I was praying it would pass. No dice. So here I was, in the most excruciating pain I've experienced since I've been born. I couldn't stand, couldn't sit, couldn't lay down - nothing. I was crawling around the house because that's all I could do.

Around 2am, I found myself reflecting on a visit to my pediatrician. I must've been about 8 years old or so. My doc told me that most kids would be screaming in agony if they had the ear infection I had. My mother has also told me time and time again that my tolerance for pain was exceptionally high. Being it that I was crawling on the floor for darn near 4 hours and I wasn't getting any better, I told my wife that we had better go to the E.R.

I won't go into detail about the tests they ran on me, but the short story version is that I was born 3 months premature and my intestines weren't fully developed. So they cut me open, fixed the intestines and went on my merry way. Well, 28 years later, the scarring from that operation became enough to block my intestines and nothing was goin' down. The doc said that the blocked portion of the small intestine was the diameter of a bratwurst. That, my friends, is no good.

The doc then performed a type of surgery using a camera vice slicing me open again. I asked if he would just cut open the big horizontal scar from birth, perform the surgery and then stitch it up to look nicer. He declined and now I have 3 new scars. Joy of joys!

There's a lot more to the story than what I've shared here. I'm just incredibly grateful that UIS has student insurance. If this had happened prior to school starting this past fall, my wife and I would be financially screwed. Admitted, we haven't seen the bill yet, but regardless of what it will be, we'll make it through.

Anyhow, if any of you out there have any interesting surgery stories, I'd love to hear them.

At this point, I have to return home and take some more pain killers.

Hope everyone's '08 is going well! Until next time...

~ Nick