Finding out I had appendicitis took a series of doctors slapping me in the stomach. On my bed in my apartment and then later in an exam room at Klinikum Lüneburg, a doctor would roll up my shirt, hold out their index and middle finger, and jab me in the stomach.
They divided it into quadrants, slapping a quarter of my stomach at a time. They didn’t ask me if it hurt; I made an audible groan when they hit that sweet spot: the bottom right of my gut. Then they would poke in, deeply, causing a similar reaction.
Three doctors did his and each came to the same conclusion: the problem is likely my appendix.
Throughout this progress I was undecided what outcome I was rooting for. I knew that it’d be better if I didn’t have appendicitis, but there was still that small amount if hope that all this sleep-depriving pain in my abdomen was just an intense need to pass gas caused by the shady and delicious pizza place Eddie and I ate before the onset of my symptoms.
While half of me wanted it to be something as simple as that, the other half wanted appendicitis.
Lacey knows how sick I feel. And Steffi, an employee with the study abroad company who I called on the emergency phone on Sunday night, knows as well. Chloe does, too. I texted her about missing class due to illness which means the entire class knew. If they wanted to, they could tell the other exchange students and the whole program would know something is wrong with Peter Frankman.
It’d be anti-climatic if I leaned to the right and farted the problem away in one explosive act.
Regardless, I had no part in deciding my illness. After an inconclusive sonogram that the German doctor tried to carefully explain was inclusive because—“How do you say?” He pokes my stomach, “There’s a lot of you, yes?”—I’m sat, once again, in the waiting room.
Ten minutes later, a beautiful nurse calls me into an examination room. Beauty strapped an ID bracelet on me, and hurriedly explained something seemingly dire to me, auf Deutsch.
Exhausted of struggling to understand or politely asking people to repeat themselves, I ask, “English?”
She flips the switch. “You’ve got to be careful,” she says, her accent thick but her English impeccable, “Because people will take your money.”
“What?” I ask.
She points to my backpack, “Your things, the hospital is not…”
“Responsible,” I offer.
“Yes, responsible. The hospital is not responsible.”
The youngest doctor to slap my stomach comes in.
I ask him, “Am I getting surgery or what?”
Everyone in the room stops and glances at each other. Of course I’m getting surgery. That’s no big secret; it’s just something no one bothered to tell me.
After telling an anesthesiologist I don’t know how much I weigh in kilograms (“a lot?” I offered), I’m then backtracked to the first receptionist I saw, then led to my room, which I share with an old man who, despite his breathing and moving around, still appears dead.
A heavy Krankenschwester shaves approximately half of my stomach and one quarter of my pubes (no style, no flare; purely cut for function).
Once in this state of shame, yet another gorgeous nurse comes in, apologizes for her “terrible” English, and reads a form to me.
“What do you eat?” She asks.
“Pizza.”
She stares.
“Meat, I guess.”
She scribbles. “What do you not eat?”
“Salad.”
“Oh.” She makes a note.
I’m impatient at this point. I hadn’t eaten since the night before and hadn’t drank water since early that morning. I’d been waiting five hours in a hospital for a 15 minute operation that they would keep me around for three days after.
While laying down, getting anesthesia from a man called Schmidt, the surgeon comes in.
“So,” the surgeon asks through one of the thicker accents, “How long are you here?”
“Until December.”
“You got here, December?”
“No,” I correct, “I got here a week ago.”
“A week!” He exclaims, the same way every nurse and doctor has when making the same small talk, “And then you have this pain.”
“Yup.”
“What about your weight?”
I don’t know how to answer this.
He continues, “It says you weight 115 kilos. That’s a lot.”
I agree with him. The weight the anesthesiologist guessed is a lot.
“What have you been eating here?”
Like I gained it all this week?
“Whatever everyone else is eating,” I answer, “Wurst I guess.”
“Maybe you go back in-” he counts on his fingers, “September, October, November, December – four months, you weigh 100 kilos?”
Schmidt injects something in my IV tube, a small hole and plastic plug that has been open since I arrived that morning. The surgeon asks me more but I just laugh and fight to keep my eyes open. The world is turning and my little gurney is being pushed into another room.
I wake up speaking German. Not wake up, come to.
I’m speaking surprisingly well, like a talkative five year old. I know this because I’m only capable of using the vocabulary and sentence structure I know, which would make me equivalent to a slow German first grader.
Upon becoming self-aware I ask the other person in the room, “Alles gut?”
To which he responds, “Alles gut.”
Then I move my left arm, which is coated in semi-hardened blood. I switch to English, “Why is my arm so bloody?”
He comes over to look and cuts the bloody hospital ID bracelet, off, leaving a bloody tan line.
I’m wheeled back to my room where my possibly dying roommate remains loudly alive. It’s night now and he’s asleep, but his asleep is louder than any other resting state I have ever heard.
He breathes deep, gasping, like a low yell at a disobedient dog. Every time in, that quick, loud, “Ah!” To further paint the picture of someone being strangled, he spasms in his sleep, jolting into the end of the bed, kicking it hard. Struggling.
My bloody gown sticks to my belly. I’m sitting at a 45′ angle, making the already too small bed even smaller, so my feet rest on the footboard. Normally, this is just inconvenient, but the planting of my feet flexes my freshly stitched core, causing intense pain.
A more concise description would be, “Sleep was hard to come by that first night.”
Any time my eyes did close the night nurse, a hag of a woman who looked like the German word for nurse, Krankenschwester, woke me up. She turned on the light to peer into the room. She’d change my IV. She would explain things to me in German I could not understand. She brought me water. Things like that.
At 4 a.m. she came into the room and told me my mother, who I had not yet talked to, was on the phone.
Okay. I rolled out of bed, which was excruciating, and got into the hall with her before she relayed to me that my mother had called.
Apparently the nurse told my mother that she could not talk to me because I was asleep, but then woke me up to tell me my mother had called.
Sleep was hard to come by that first night.
Klinikum Lüneburg feels like a dumb prison where guards don’t understand how a prison works. I’m allowed to walk around as much as the hospital as I want to since I’m well enough to do everything (except leave apparently).
There are no restrictions on visitors—the number, length, or hour—so another student studying abroad came by and chainsmoked on my balcony past 10 p.m.
The nurses are a problem, too.
Every nurse is statuesque and beautiful, which makes my weakness and shame more shameful and weak. I feel like a burden, like someone else’s responsibility all the fucking time. This was less of an issue when I got sick at home, with only my mother seeing me in such a sad state; ing Germany I’m doing it in front of beautiful women I’d otherwise try to impress.
After my second night of semi-sleep in the hospital, three doctors walked in to check up on me. They asked me a couple of questions before telling me I’d be staying another night.
“Can I just leave today?” I asked. “I feel fine.”
They spoke to each other in German. It was just simple enough for me to understand. I was well enough to leave today, but another night wouldn’t hurt.