Well, I know I was complaining before Christmas about how annoyed I was with everyone changing dates and all that jazz..... Surprise!!! I ended up having the absolute worst Christmas ever and NOT thanks to any of my family!

I woke up Christmas morning with a terrible stomach ache (at my parents house, 3 hours from home). Didn't think much of it, I'd eaten pretty late the night before. We opened presents, ate some breakfast.... then I got sick. And sicker. And sicker. I thought I was being pretty quiet about it, but my boyfriend came in the bathroom to see what was going on and my mom followed him... yeah, ended up at the hospital for an emergency appendectomy. Apparently I am a "very lucky lady" and they caught it just in time.

I didn't realize at the time how serious it was, I just laid there and cried and cried b/c I wanted to go home to my new house to have my Christmas with my man. I thought the look on my boyfriend's face was b/c he was upset that we weren't going home now, we were celebrating in the hospital, yay! Oh no, it was more serious than they were letting on to me apparently... probably b/c I couldn't stop crying. I'm laying there thinking about how I ruined Christmas and not everyone else and then the nurses start telling me about what they'd be doing if they were at home and hadn't been called in and gosh, no one was nice. Christmas totally sucked this year.

Luckily after much ado over nothing the next morning (they made me take a nap after giving me one lousy Vicodin) they let me go home. I had to stop every hour on the hour to walk around during my 4 hours in the car and I couldn't carry anything in the house and my man took awesome care of me. Then we had Christmas. It wasn't the same, but at least I'm more thankful now.

On the bright side (besides being alive and what looks like will be a cool scar), while I'm laying on the stretcher getting ready to go in for surgery, lamenting about ruined Christmases and how I want to go home.... my mom says, well, maybe next year we'll have Christmas at your house to make up for you not getting it this year. Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

moonduck (who got a real crash course on the workings of our lower intestines for a Christmas present)

Hey Moonduck
So sorry to hear about your appendix....scary thing...My husband had it a few years ago, we had been spending the weekend at the lake about 4 hours from home. We flew home, didnt want to get stuck at a hospital there with no one to help out. Same thing, he was hours from bursting, emergency surgery at 3am sort of thing.

I am glad you are feeling better. At least you didnt have to deal with any relatives that you werent looking forward to seeing.

Get better soon, enjoy the time that you can just lay there and heal!
crazyoli

They weren't kidding that you were lucky!

My brother had his appendix burst and then had to deal with peritonitis. Very scary and nearly fatal. That was decades ago and he still loves showwing off his scar :-)

You didn't ruin Christmas. Believe me, your family is very happy that it turned out the way it did and those nurses knew they were on call. They should've been a tad bit more considerate.

Speedy recovery and have a wonderful Christmas this year.
Take care, Orion

Well, thank God you're alright, and it may have been a horrible Christmas, but look at how worried your boyfriend and mom were about you and how much they care about you and pulled together for you.

That certainly says something good..

I hope you feel better soon and I hope next Christmas is extra special for you

Jaxx

moonduck! My goodness! I'm so glad you got medical treatment, surgery, and you're home with a guy to love you and care for you. Now, I know you will be heartbroken, but Dr. Eaglewatcher says absolutely no housework or heavy lifting! Are you amazed you saved this incident for Christmas? What if this had happened when you were trying to move to your new house? Glad you are home and on your way to recovery.
Eaglewatcher--who doesn't give a hoot about bedside manner as long as they show up and get the medical part right.

I am so, so glad that everything turned out all right. How perfectly awful that you had to deal with insensitive nurses. As one of the other responders said, they knew perfectly well they were on call, and shouldn't have added to your distress by complaining. Personally, I would have been inclined to say, "You know, I'm not particularly happy to be here, either." (Of course, I never think of the perfect thing to say until long after the event...) Perfectly polite to say, but points out to these grinches that you weren't intentionally trying to ruin their holidays, and that it was probably a great deal easier to be in their shoes than in yours, so to speak (I'm assuming you were shoeless:-).

And listen. As others have said, you did NOT ruin Christmas. Think about it this way--the original event that Christmas is supposed to be celebrating involved two young people, one of whom was ready to give birth, and they couldn't find a place to stay. I'm guessing they were tired, you KNOW Mary was sore, and giving birth (from what I hear--I've not gone through it myself) is no picnic. You've just experienced some serious pain yourself, and I'm guessing that by the time all was said and done, all of you were tired, too. The one good thing in Mary's case is that presumably she wasn't kicked out of the stable the very next morning, which just goes to show you that sometimes we modern folk can be quite a bit more unkind--at least in the institutional insurance sense--than people were then. So rather than thinking that this year you ruined Christmas, you could consider Christmas 2006 as the year you went to extremes to commemorate the original.

In other words--you've a right to do a little grumbling, you don't owe anyone an apology, and I hope that should you ever need emergency medical care again, you'll be blessed with kinder staff. I'm glad that at the least you received a little TLC from Mom and boyfriend.

So unless you are a flagellant (who always remind me of the monks smacking themselves over the heads with boards in Monty Python and the Holy Grail--THUNK!), drop your guilt right now. You heard me! Drop it! RIGHT THERE!

Hope your New Year is happy, and that you resolve and succeed in tossing any and all inappropriate guilt in the waste bin.

Pied Piper

Moonduck- ALL those nurses are thanking you this week as they get their per-diam pay + their holiday differential pay in their checks. Be well and know there is always next Christmas at your new home!
Six Stars

You DO have a cool scar....I got my appendix out when I was pretty young...it's miserable...but you know, I wouldn't trade that battle scar for anything...(well, I would, actually) it looks so pretty with a bikini ;) Now you just need a C-section scar to go with it and I think you'll be all set...but maybe you'll want to wait on that one for awhile....


sorry about your miserable week and glad everything turned out okay in the end~~

Fellow scarred one,
dewdrop