171–180 of 212 posts
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Any permanent damage? Or did you make a full recovery?
I had/have a few issues now. My kidneys were damaged and there have been slight memory issues. Both eased over time. The weirdest thing was, I started craving BBQ ribs. I was indifferent to them before.
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Doctor: in your case, kills you in about 24-48 hours. I had mine out as well. I was 19. My dad drove me to the hospital. Doc slipped his finger up my bum, said, “you have appendicitis. You need surgery. Now.” I was being operated on quickly after that. It had ruptured. So it goes.
>Doc slipped his finger up my bum Is this a standard way to diagnose appendicitis?
When I was 34, appendicitid struck again. I new instantly that I had it, and this time I did not fear the hospital. This time, I wanted to avoid hospital because we were just a few weeks from moving to a new house. So I took antibiotics again, measured the fever, noted every measurement point in Excel but after 36 hours I found that it was not getting any better. So finally I took advantage of my wonderful German health insurance and got the appendix brilliantly removed...
Just want to state: there are times when antibiotics work and times when they do not.
This reminds me of when tonsils were removed at the first sign of trouble. When I was in my early 20s, in the 1970s, I went to my doctor about a bad sore throat. He advised me to see an ENT who barely bothered to look down my throat for more than a second and automatically declared I needed mine removed. That bothered me but I very much respected my personal doctor who said he respected this ENT. When I mention this…
Are there hypotheses now for the purpose of the tonsils the way they've developed some for the purpose of the appendix?
This reminds me of when tonsils were removed at the first sign of trouble. When I was in my early 20s, in the 1970s, I went to my doctor about a bad sore throat. He advised me to see an ENT who barely bothered to look down my throat for more than a second and automatically declared I needed mine removed. That bothered me but I very much respected my personal doctor who said he respected this ENT. When I mention this…
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Technically died likely means cardiopulmonary arrest aka a heartrate of zero. Medical personnel refer to this as "a code" or "code blue" I drowned as a kid in a friend's pool when I was 7 or 8. I was "technically dead" as well. No afterlife experience, but as I was thrashing underwater, my entire body felt like you feel when your leg goes to sleep, and before I went "to sleep" I got really calm and everything was pea…
You're crazy lucky, CPR isn't supposed to bring you back from anything or flush water out of your lungs, it's supposed to keep your blood flowing to your brain until paramedics can get to you.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doctor: in your case, kills you in about 24-48 hours. I had mine out as well. I was 19. My dad drove me to the hospital. Doc slipped his finger up my bum, said, “you have appendicitis. You need surgery. Now.” I was being operated on quickly after that. It had ruptured. So it goes.
A ruptured appendix would not likely be resolved with antibiotics, I'd think. But catching appendicitis before it ruptures would be a less critical issue.
I found this conversation unnerving at 13 years old: Doctor: "Does all this make sense? We need to remove your appendix.. now." Me: "Doctor, ok, so you need to remove my appendix cause if you don't I could get really sick. " Doctor: "Yes." Me: "What does the appendix do?" Doctor: "We don't know."
Someone mentioned tonsils below, but in the past, we also had bloodletting, trepanation, and various other unnecessary excisions. Foreskin may one day join the list (who knows, though). This all raises the question of why medicine is practiced the way it is, with so much appeal to authority and memorization, rather than something more intrinsically scientific. Why do bad practices persist for so long?
Define "bad". Appendicitis patients invariably survive surgery and go on to live their normal, healthy lives. Until an objectively better solution comes along, we have no reason to not go with what Just Works™. And that's why medicine dislikes change.