I haven’t been sick in a long, long time, not since I can remember. I’m talking about the general illness: the cough and sore throat, along with nausea and diarrhea. I’ve been lucky thus far, but there are many types of illnesses besides that, such as appendicitis which I recovered from around 2006.

It happened one night when I was driving north to see my parents. I felt in my stomach a dull pain. I thought it was gas, so I tried to sleep. But it kept me up at night, and the pain only worsened like it was tying my stomach in knots. I woke up my parents in the middle of the night and told them I had to go to the hospital.

The doctor never ran any tests on me and decided I had gas. She suggested I take Tums, so I went home without any remedy. The pain was still there. It only got worse on the second day, but I tried to pay it no mind.

It got to its worst on day three when I looked in the mirror and saw my stomach drooping to the left side of my body. It looked unnatural, so I drove to urgent care with a centralized pain on my left side and waited forever in the waiting room like I always did.

The doctor finally saw me in his office. He wore a tracksuit and chewed gum. All he was missing was a whistle. I told him about the pain and showed my stomach drooping to one side. He told me to jump. And when I did, it was as if a bowling ball had punched me in the gut. I grimaced in pain and held my stomach.

The doctor immediately wrote on his clipboard. “You need to go to the hospital right away. Have them take x-rays.”

He never told me what he thought it was. I drove to the college hospital, and they directed me to radiology, where they took the x-rays–I forgot which kind.

A specialist saw me in a room and showed me the x-rays, where the issue lay, and told me my appendix was about to burst.

“My what?”

I’d never heard about appendicitis except for one time when it attacked a high school friend. He had to miss school for over a month, and I thought he was lucky. But my tune had changed.

The doctor who would operate on me flew in from South Africa. His name was so long that he told me just to call him Dr. K. He pressed on my stomach where it drooped while I lay in a hospital bed, and I winced again in pain.

“You’re very lucky,” he told me. “I will put you out and begin the operation.”

When I woke up again, the surgery was all done. Dr. K had removed my appendix through my stomach and left a little crescent-shaped scar. But I still felt a discomfort in my lower abdomen as if the appendicitis was still there.

They discharged me on the day after. I remember my mother was both angry and worried because she thought I was on the cliff of death, because my appendix had almost burst. I didn’t feel the same way, with an inkling I would still survive, and I wasn’t all too pleased. It wasn’t a happier time in my life.

That was really my only surgery. The hospital would send me a bill of over a thousand dollars, and I was furious because they’d misdiagnosed me the first time. I wrote an angry letter to the head of the department, and he waived the entire bill. What was a thousand dollars to them? The surgery was basically free.

I’ve never broken bones or dealt with fractures. I’m full of mental illnesses that shall never go away. I believe I have carpal tunnel in my left hand induced by work. No genetic illnesses or autoimmune disorders, but I do get migraines from time to time. All in all, I’m mostly a bill of good health.