Notes on a Revolting Appendix

In early November last year, I had surgery for appendicitis. A team of surgeons cut three holes in my abdomen - one just under my bellybutton, one around the left side of my hip, and one slightly above my groin – in order to remove my swollen, infected appendix. Within twenty-four hours, I went from fearing death in an A&E waiting room to drowsy, painful convalescence. I have only two things to show for this experience - the surgical scars and some notes I wrote in the waiting room.

I knew I wanted to share these notes (which append this post), but I also wanted some kind of preface. In early drafts I tried to tell it all, to turn the experience into a complete, satisfying narrative that would neatly contextualise my scribblings. If there was a story, I thought, there must also be a meaning, a way to make my pain significant. The problem - nothing I wrote was true.

No story could be. The truth is that I was on so many strong painkillers in the recovery period that I barely remember how any of it felt. On top of this, the appendicitis came at one of the worst times in my life –  a point when years of repressed rage and misery and self-hatred seized on me at once. Between drugs and dumped trauma, the whole thing is a fog.

The only thing I remember well is being lonely in the waiting room. I went to the hospital alone. I wish I hadn’t been alone. People offered to come and I wish I’d said yes.

It’s difficult for me to accept this gap. For years, I have been terrified of the idea that I might just forget everything. There was a difficult time in my life where my usual vivacity vanished and I suddenly became very timid and afraid. I guess I’ve spent much of my life since then shoring up all my traits and memories, all that I have and am, as a surge barrier in case of another storm. For instance, I recently began spending half an hour before bed every night trying to remember, in as much detail as possible, everything about my day so I won’t lose any of it, so I can grab onto whatever I want whenever I need. I’m trying to prove to myself I won’t just disappear again.

A month before the surgery, however, I was struggling to even take hold of myself. For a long time I’d felt like I was missing something essential - a drawing that someone never finished colouring in. The fear and shyness of my teenage years was still stuck in me somewhere, rotting. That emptiness came to a head in mid-October, when I was in therapy trying to learn how to colour my life in myself.

Telling the whole story was meant to fix me. If I had memories to share, I could be all I wanted to be: a whole person, fully alive. The appendicitis experience was a chance to make myself, and to share it was to prove to everyone I was real after all. I couldn’t miss another opportunity, like I had all my life. I tried so hard to write it and post it to keep here forever, but it was impossible. I just don’t remember enough. These waiting room notes are all that’s left, the only record written in the moment. It’s time, then, to turn to them and consider them briefly, before letting go.

There are two opposing sides to the notes themselves: one which wants the appendix out and one which empathises with it. For the former, this surgery is the final extinction of all my bad habits; one painful ordeal and I will be clean. Only then can I finally move on. But the latter knows what it is to feel disposable and useless. It’s despondent, it’s who I am when I feel most like flesh, when I’m very cold or sick or sometimes when I’m being fucked, and feel like a vessel made only for the cold or the sickness or the fucking. In that state, I am just like my appendix, a thing made to sit around and decay.

I’m still split in two like this. My whole life I’ve veered between being hypercompetent and being a burnt-out wreck, and that hasn’t changed. I wanted this experience to be the catalyst for me fixing myself. Right after the surgery, it seemed like a natural reset, but then I went into the world and things fell apart. Over the last five months I’ve kept retracing my steps, kept trying to capture this moment to make up for this lost future, to synthesise these two halves of me and make myself whole. I had to go back, though.

When you return to the world after being sick, you get used to certain questions: What happened? Are you okay? What did it feel like? Except, when I was catching up with an old friend she asked me a new one: ‘Do you feel different?’ I thought about how little had changed, how the experience had split me in two, but said to her ‘I feel better.’ I explained that immediately after the surgery, I was just happy to be alive, and have a new beginning. I don’t know if it really has been. Then she asked, ‘Are you different, though?’

One thing I can say for sure is I now think about positive affirmations every day. I’m trying to care for myself where before I barely even cared about myself, and the idea that mere repetition makes something more true to you is attractive. It’s just like my failed story – maybe with words I can will myself into being, in all its colours. And I know this isn’t how affirmations work, I know recovery’s a process but still - I just want a magic word.

Get better get better get better get better get better. I will keep repeating this in my head until something changes.

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Waiting Room Notes

It’s easier not to stress if I just tell myself my appendix is where all of the bad parts of my personality are. All my damage and bad habits and aspects that aren’t conducive to living and living people sit in there.

It sucks to have to have surgery but it’s providence that it happened now - it’s the last gasp of someone who had been slowly dying for a long time. Someone who was tearing the real me apart, more and more every second.

It’s so weird and rare that I end up in so much pain that I can’t even really feel like… I have emotions rn but then they’re so small compared to the pain. My feelings are the tiny village, living in the monumental shadow of my mountain of pain.

I can’t stop thinking about Prometheus having his liver pecked out. It’s where Ancient Greeks believed the feelings were. Every day his liver would grow back, he’d feel again, only to have it pecked into ribbons right after. The opposite of this would be for the bad thing to keep growing back, only to be removed to save you. Isn’t this just as bad?

When I think about my appendix bursting, I picture it as a bag of popcorn exploding in a microwave. This makes me laugh, which just makes my abdomen hurt.

If the appendix knew we thought it was unnecessary, do you think it would be hurt? Appendicitis is non-contagious - a very self-contained infection. It’s a totally internal matter. Do you think that maybe it infects itself out of spite, because we refuse to see its potential?

I can’t get over this. I thought this would happen so thought I was ready but I’m not. When they take my appendix out, there will literally be a part of me missing. And what replaces it? Will there just be empty space? After tomorrow, I will be physically emptier than I am now.