I Left My Appendix in Bekescsaba
“Ouch! Ouch again!” I said to myself, my favorite conversation partner when I am out and about alone, as I was during a recent trip to Bekescsaba, Hungary (220 kilometers southeast of Budapest). . This is nothing more than a touch of indigestion, albeit a tad more acute than usual. It was most likely the result of digging – somewhat overzealously — into some spicy and juicy kolbasz (Hungarian sausage).
Back home I eat lots of garlic and wash it down with green tea – plenty to counter any deleterious effects from indulging in fatty sausage. Further, a diet concentrating heavily on antioxidants, I knew, surely must make me immune from serious ailments. Okay, perhaps my physique is not going to be mistaken for that of Michael Phelps. But at 43, having never experienced any illnesses beyond a common cold in all that time, why should I spend an extra few bucks for insurance on this trip. The odds of not falling ill on this journey were strongly in my favor. The expense was simply not worth it.
The pain, though still noticeable, had subsided later in the afternoon. I had a light dinner and turned in for an early night. By midnight, however, the pain had returned with a vengeance. It was excruciating. In fact, if there is a word that signifies a type of pain beyond excruciating, then that’s what I would use to describe it. There was nothing else to do but put an end to my stupid male stubbornness and ring for an ambulance.
Within minutes I was at the hospital and answering questions at triage. The pain at that point was so great I hardly knew my own name, yet the nurse on duty insisted on extracting that morsel of information from me, as well as my mother’s maiden name and my date and place of birth. I thought was going to ask me the name of the president of Botswana and who won the National League batting title in 1953 next. Why is it that wherever one goes the people at triage seem more interested in extracting information which at the time appears trivial when compared to alleviating a person’s suffering?
Alas, I was eventually wheeled into an examination room. An ultrasound indicated that I probably had appendicitis and – as there is no 24-hour surgery in Bekescsaba – I would be operated on at 6 am the following morning. Thenceforward, I was ushered into a room at about 2 am and supplied with ample intravenous injections of all sorts during the interim.
The nurses in the ward seemed to marvel at the curiosity which had fallen in their midst – a North American, by all appearances the first of its kind to be treated in the hospital, certainly it this wing.
I tried to look on the bright side during the four hours that preceded the operation: if a person needs to have surgery it best to be alerted to it and have it down with the span of a few hours rather than be provided a date months in advance. In the latter case, all one can think about in the intervening period is, “Heavens to Betsy, I am going to have surgery on such-and-such a day.”
The operation went as scheduled. When I returned back to the world of the conscious, I was told that I did indeed have appendicitis, and not just any old kind. The operation found my appendix had perforated. Burst. It was the kind of ailment that would warrant an extended hospital stay, I was told. How much was this going to cost? I wondered.
Though landing in a hospital has to rank at the top of a traveler’s worst nightmares – right after getting stuck with a middle seat on a transatlantic flight with an insurance salesman on your left and another insurance salesman on your right – I felt that I was in competent medical hands throughout the experience.
Perhaps the stay could have been enhanced by better food, most of which seemed to be feeble attempts at luncheon meat. But moaning about hospital food appears to be a universal gripe and one that is surely outweighed by the overall price tag of my ordeal, which totaled an infinitesimally smaller amount than the horror stories of other uninsured individuals who underwent the same procedure in less fortunate locations, ie, a hosptial in the United States.
