{"id":1120,"date":"2010-09-24T01:16:19","date_gmt":"2010-09-24T08:16:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.ups.edu\/studyingabroad\/?p=1120"},"modified":"2013-04-01T08:30:20","modified_gmt":"2013-04-01T15:30:20","slug":"i-survived-the-typhoon-%ef%bc%88and-the-hospital%ef%bc%89","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/2010\/09\/24\/i-survived-the-typhoon-%ef%bc%88and-the-hospital%ef%bc%89\/","title":{"rendered":"I survived the typhoon \uff08and the hospital\uff09"},"content":{"rendered":"

It all started on my birthday.<\/p>\n

\"Marked

Marked up and ready to be opened up.<\/p><\/div>\n

I had a terrific birthday dim-sum lunch that my co-teachers Winnie and Sunny took me out to and I thought I just ate too much, which I did. After lunch, we all headed over to the bureau of education headquarters to have our bi-weekly fulbright workshop with all the american and taiwanese english teachers. This was ok. Afterwards at about 4pm, I started having severe pain in my abdomen,\u00a0it would radiate around to my back, up to my heart, all over the place. I think it’s the worst pain I’ve ever been in, but I can’t say for sure.<\/p>\n

\"It

It really looks just like a dumpling<\/p><\/div>\n

I tried sticking it out for Chinese class at 6pm, but left early and tried to sleep some of it off, but by 9pm, it was clear that I wasn’t really improving, so I made the call to head to the hospital.<\/p>\n

After getting to the ER and getting prodded by an extremely efficient Taiwanese ER doc, I was diagnosed with appendicitis. I was SO relieved, I was really worried about having to pass some kidney stones or something, I had no idea what my pain was doing at that point, and feared the worst. I ended up needing a CT scan to confirm my condition, and after the CT scan, it was obvious that my appendix needed to be removed.<\/p>\n

I finally got in to surgery about 1 am Thursday morning and produced, so they say, a wicked infected appendix. My surgery resident was so jazzed about it, he kept saying it really looked like a dumpling.<\/p>\n

\"Good

Good morning Paul<\/p><\/div>\n

Post surgery, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Paul, my roommate had been checked in to the hospital as well. (pleased to have company, but sympathetic of course, to Paul’s illness)<\/p>\n

Sadly, what i had hoped to be a routine appendix removal, recuperation and recovery turned a tad for the worse. Three days post surgery, finding myself sill holding having some awful high fevers (highest was 40C) and a lot of pain it became pretty apparent that something was amiss. Thank goodness I was in contact with my parents every step of the way. It was at this point that Dr. Maples came in to the picture, arriving in Taiwan on Saturday morning.<\/p>\n

It turned out that I was somewhere between regular appendicitis and a burst appendix, where my appendix hadn’t ruptured, but there was still danger of infection forming an\u00a0abscess\u00a0in my abdomen. I had a drain put into me to try to pull this out, but it wasn’t getting everywhere that it needed to be, so I basically just had to get my antibiotics changed and wait it out while my body did its thing.<\/p>\n

\"my

my little buddy \uff08\u5c0f\u670b\u53cb\uff09<\/p><\/div>\n

Now, I’m out of the hospital, eating again, oh yeah, I didn’t really eat anything except a cookie from Grandma in those 7 days in the hospital, and feeling much more energetic and in high spirits.<\/p>\n

Also, there was the biggest rain fall in Kaohsiung that the city had seen in about 30 years. I can’t share much of the typhoon, I was tucked away in the fortress hospital, but it rained about 30 inches in 24 hours, which is almost 4x as much water as Yakima gets in a year. Watch out for late season typhoons, they’re intense!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It all started on my birthday. I had a terrific birthday dim-sum lunch that my co-teachers Winnie and Sunny took me out to and I thought I just ate too much, which I did. After lunch, we all headed over … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":70,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2010-spring-2011-mark-maples-10-fulbright-to-taiwan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/70"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5301,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions\/5301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.pugetsound.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}