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November 29, 2008

Stephanie Salter: Finally, I’ve got something in common with Barbara Bush

By Stephanie Salter

TERRE HAUTE — Some people might focus on the rotten appendix and post-op pain. I choose to concentrate on the marvel of laparoscopy and the memory of lying in bed in Union Hospital (on a workday morning), watching Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell tap dance on TV.

In other words, this is my Thanksgiving 2008 column.

It may be unorthodox — three days after Thanksgiving — but I realized last week that an appendectomy is like just about every other experience in life: We can elect to see only the obvious, negative aspects, or we can go hunting for the positives and use them to fuel one of our most potent natural medicines — gratitude.

Sometimes, of course, the hunt for the positives is tedious or almost elusive.

Reading brave but funny online accounts of cancer battles by some of my Garfield High School classmates, I am reminded just how tough that hunt can be. But the people waging these battles seem to be accomplished hunters; their sense of humor gives them Superman’s X-ray vision to detect all sorts of positives.

The former Linda Albin’s most recent installment, for example, describes a 20-hour radiation ordeal that would be against the Geneva Conventions if it were not done in the name of cancer therapy. But in her pain and isolation, Linda found it in her to start a sci-fi fantasy about a fly buzzing back and forth over her bed.

“I had this thought about me and the fly being exposed to the radiation all night holed up in my room,” Linda wrote on purpleeagles67.com. “I wondered if when the nurse came in the next morning she would see me in bed with the fly’s head and over on the window sill the fly would be slowly crawling with my head and me saying ‘Help me.’”

Linda finished her account with words of gratitude for the completion of her radiation therapy and the support she has received from family and friends over the last many months.

Compared to her hunt for the positives, my appendectomy was a piece of Hostess Ding Dong. But the experience did allow me to learn some things about modern medicine and to reflect upon the wonder that is the human body.

Who knows why an appendix that has hung around quietly for 59 years suddenly decides to go bad? These things happen, especially in an industrialized nation where our lack of cholera and dysentery has fairly idled the appendix in adults.

Myth buster: Long dismissed as useless or “vestigial,” the appendix is emerging as a small but functional organette. Not only does it produce and protect good bacteria for the gut, as Oklahoma State University physiology professor Loren G. Martin discusses in an essay available online, the appendix is an active part of fetal development; in young adults it’s “thought to be involved primarily in immune functions.”

Even though I was not “presenting” in the classic manner of acute appendicitis — vomiting, fever, debilitating abdominal pain — I knew something was wrong with me. I barely considered a bum appendix, however, because I’m so, um, old.

How bum was it? I’ll skip the disgusting details, but my surgeon Dr. Glenn Mandeville observed, “It wasn’t pretty in there.”

I was so relieved to learn via CT scan that the problem was only appendicitis, I didn’t care if the wormy, little abdominal cul de sac looked like “Alien III.” In fact, by the time I got a bed in Union’s obstetrics ward about 3 a.m. on a Thursday, I was in complete and serene “whatever” mode.

Laparoscopy or eight-inch open incision, I was cool for whatever was coming down.

Maybe you have heard of laparoscopy. Maybe you have had your gall bladder whisked out via the procedure because that is its most common use. Last week, doctors repaired a perforated ulcer in former First Lady Barbara Bush with laparoscopy.

For my money (and I’ll bet Barb’s), laparoscopy is representative of so much of modern medicine. It is an undersung miracle. First performed on dogs at the turn of the 20th Century, it evolved over the decades for humans, and got kicked into the stratosphere by advanced computer technology.

Being a beneficiary of laparoscopy — three small holes in the belly versus a big knife slash — has reminded me how weary I am of people who repeatedly say, “I hate doctors and hospitals.”

Hey, nobody but the Munchausen-inclined looks forward to visiting a doctor or being admitted to a hospital. But this cranky, erroneous notion that all doctors are quacks and that practically everyone who enters a hospital comes out sicker or dead — well, enough already.

I have not swallowed a pain pill in more than a week, and I am telling you — hand on the Bible — I had a pretty good time in the hospital. After my nice first-night roommate was released and I got the joint all to myself, I had a really good time.

Note to health-care consumers of the Wabash Valley: Single occupancy patient rooms are the Ghost of Christmas Future at Union. When the hospital’s expansion is completed next fall, singles are all that will exist. Everyone will better off, from technicians who wheel EKG machines in and out of phone booth spaces, to patients, themselves, who won’t have to pretend a translucent curtain actually divides a room.

I readily admit that some of my good time was the result of three or four IVs of the greatest drug on Earth, Demerol. After the laparoscopy, when anesthesiologist Dr. Jose David told me he had prescribed Demerol for the next day or so, I was ecstatic.

“That’s my favorite!” I told him, which made him smile in a way that said, “Man, you see everything in this line of work.”

Other contributors to my good time were the OB ward’s nurses, Donna, Nancy, Miranda and Jennifer, who tended to my pre- and post-op needs; bouquets and a pumpkin candle from friends and relatives; my mom’s hand to hold during the scary time before the CT scan results; and Dr. Welby-like vigilance from Kathy Stienstra, my primary-care physician.

One other positive factor was cable television, which enabled me to watch “Broadway Melody of 1940” about 8 a.m., the day after my surgery.

I have always loved the tap dance in that film that Astaire and Powell perform to Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine.” It is utter perfection. Watching it as I floated on my magic Demerol carpet, I transcended time, space and pain.

“Lucky me,” I said aloud, even though I was the only person in the room. And I meant it, from the bottom of my heart to the staples in my gut. Lucky, lucky me.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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