Yesterday I was sitting at work late morning and found myself in a fairly common position in my chair; that is to say, completely slouched back almost entirely reclining. It’s easy to do when you spend all day every day staring at a computer monitor. I adjusted to sit up when I felt a sharp pain in my lower midsection. Sitting up fully, I suddenly felt as if a wave was washing over me and I felt extremely “out of it”. My vision blurred; I may have nearly passed out. In short order I was sitting at my desk feeling feverish, clammy, and very uncomfortable. I left my desk to try and “take care of business” as it were, but that didn’t really help anything. Popped some Tylenol to try and fight off the throbbing in my midsection, and tried to get back to work not knowing what had just happened to my body.

The next hour was very long. Still not seeing very straight, feeling very pulled back from my surroundings, I was getting a bit nervous about “what if” something had happened to my appendix or something else. After talking with my boss who is also a volunteer EMT, he told me to take off and go see the doctor. Off I went, about an hour and a half after I started not feeling well, and I called my doctor to see what he said. He of course wasn’t in, but the nurse I spoke with said that per the symptoms I was describing that I would probably be sent to the hospital for an exam even if I came to the office and that I would be best to just go straight there.

I opted to head back to the hospital in town, in case I did get admitted I figured it would only be 5 minutes for the wife and baby to come over and see me. And a very long story short, I spent about 4.5 hours in the hospital without ever getting a real diagnosis. I had almost all the symptoms of a burst appendix, at least in the early stages. Fever, feeling of having to go to the bathroom, pain near the belly button which eventually moved lower and down to the right. But even after going through the physical exam and then being subjected to a CT Scan, nothing showed up to indicate anything was wrong. The doctor told me even if it were something like a kidney stone, at least that would have shown up on the results. So I was sent home and told to keep an eye on the pain and to come back if I started feeling worse again.

During my stay in the hospital the fever had started subsiding (I’m not sure if that was a natural occurance, if the Tylenol had a hand in that, or perhaps it was the ice-cold saline they pumped through my veins) but it was still a strange series of events. And today I still have occasional pains in my lower right midsection, but nothing like what I was experiencing yesterday.

Overall I did manage to learn a few things during the adventure though. First, I learned that hospitals are scary places. Not because of how big or how sterile they are, or anything like that. No, they’re scary because you realize that they are just as disorganized as any other place of work and when you’re trusting these people with your health and well-being, it’s just a scary prospect. I learned that they recently changed the Contrast liquid that you need to drink and that it really didn’t taste as bad as the horror stories that I had heard. In truth it tasted a bit like a powdered health drink I had at the gym when I was up at Sugarbush last Fall – only I think the Contrast drink was meant to taste “as good as possible” and that other stuff was meant to taste “good”. I learned that CT Scans make your body feel very strange while they are being run. And I learned to never, ever again let a nurse put the I.V. port into my dominant wrist ever again. The nurse allegedly couldn’t get into the vein on the back of my hand, so instead I got stuck in the wrist. Mind you, this is my right wrist and I am a righty. I drive stick, I use the mouse all day for work, I play racquetball, and I have a disc golf tournament coming up this weekend. And while the pain and/or discomfort has mostly subsided from having it in my wrist, I was not a happy camper being stuck there and having to leave it in for over 4 hours.

Anyway, who knows what was or is wrong with me. But until I’m in more severe pain I guess I just have to grab a straw and suck it up.

When Season 3 of Lost ended last year, I thought February of 2008 would never come. This is a show that I watched with anticipation after I just happened to be sitting in the room when suddenly a plane was crashing on my television, people were running around screaming, everything that most viewers know what made the premiere so spectacular. Far and away the most expensive pilot episode ever made, and the production values shone bright. For the very few first weeks I was into it: and then “the monster” was introduced to the show. Great, I thought. So much promise and we turn it into a freaking made-for-TV Jurassic Park ripoff.

With that the show had lost my interest. I went on with life, and time moved on until Season 2 began to approach. My buddy Modeps started ranting about how he couldn’t wait for Lost to come back, and we discussed my brief affair with the show before I had moved on from it. He assured me that the Jurassic Park feeling was put to the side in short order and the show had begun to focus on other things, and suggested that I give it another chance. Being as I was unemployed at the time, I made liberal use of my bandwidth and a lot of “friends” on BitTorrent and grabbed the first full season. I caught myself up to where I had left the show in no time, and found myself going episode to episode in rapid succession, not wanting to take a break for fear of wondering what would happen next.

The breaks were inevitable, but I still made short work of the first season and was right on board for Season 2. Since then I have been a firm devotee of the show, and it is quite honestly the only show on television that I have to watch. (Just ask my wife.) Even when the ride gets bumpy, I’m back week after week for more. And in some ways I kind of laugh at some of the other fans I talk with/work with; “man, I was hoping for answers last night but nothing happened! They just made more questions!” Uhh, duh? That’s the way this show works – or have you guys not been paying attention?

That said, it has gotten under my skin some of the creative liberties that the producers have taken in the show (there is no chance that the Hydra was on a second island – an island that no one seemed to know about even though it should be in plain sight from about 1/3 of the main island’s coast or from up on the mountains), and while it seemed like they were starting to run out of steam a little bit those feelings all went away when the Season 3 finale hit. Wondering what on earth you are watching all episode only to find out “Holy crap, this was a flash FORWARD!” And the flash forwards in the first three episodes of Season 4 have also been a very welcome change of pace. I suppose something like this was bound to happen eventually; there really is only so much back story that you can provide about the different characters on the island. And the subtle comments made in the flash forwards that you know are going to make sense once this whole thing wraps up after all six seasons have run their course? Absolute things of beauty and they just keep you on the hook begging for more.