n January of 2007, I developed a mild stomach ache and general feeling of being unwell while at a Sunday brunch. Initially, the pain sat in the center of my abdomen just above my belly button, but gradually over the course of the day inched its way down into my right lower quadrant, causing me to wonder briefly if I'd developed acute appendicitis. However, by evening the pain had actually begun to improve so I dismissed the possibility; I'd never heard of case of appendicitis resolving on its own without surgery. But mindful of the adage that the physician who treats himself has a fool for a patient, the next day I asked one of my physician friends to examine me. When he did, he found a fullness he didn't like in my right lower quadrant and ordered CT scan. To our mutual surprise, it showed that I had, in fact, developed acute appendicitis.
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I saw a surgeon later that afternoon who began me on antibiotics and scheduled an elective laparscopic appendectomy, which he performed two days later. The surgery went well and I was back at home that night with a bloated stomach but minimal discomfort.
At 3 a.m., however, I awoke with projectile vomiting and after a particular violent episode briefly lost consciousness. Panicked, my wife called 911 and an ambulance delivered me back to the hospital where I was found to be anemic. My surgeon diagnosed an intra-abdominal bleed and began following my red blood cell count every few hours, hoping the bleeding would stop on its own. By late afternoon, however, it became clear that it wasn't, so I was taken back to the operating room where the surgeon found and evacuated approximately 1.5 liters of free-flowing blood from inside my abdomen. All told, I'd bled out half of my blood volume over the course of sixteen hours. Over the next few days, however, my blood count stabilized and my strength returned, so I was sent home four days after I'd been admitted, slightly less bloated than I'd been after the first surgery but four units more full of a stranger's blood.
Three weeks later, my wife and I took a four hour flight to Mexico—a vacation we'd planned to take in Cabo San Lucas prior to my illness—spent three days on the beach, and then flew back home.
Two days later, I developed diarrhea. Because I'd only had bottled water while in Mexico, I thought I'd contracted a viral gastroenteritis that would resolve on its own within a few days. While driving home a few days later, however, I developed right-sided chest pain. I called my physician friend who asked me to return immediately to the hospital to have a chest CT, which in short order showed I'd thrown a large pulmonary embolism. I was taken immediately to the emergency room and placed on intravenous blood thinners to prevent another clot from traveling to my lung and possibly killing me. Luckily, this time my hospital stay was uneventful, and I was ultimately discharged on an oral anti-coagulant called coumadin.
A week later, the diarrhea still hadn't resolved, however, so a stool culture was sent for clostridium difficile. It came back positive, undoubtedly as a result of the antibiotics I'd been given prior to my first surgery, so I was started on Vancomycin. Then I developed an allergic reaction to the Vancomycin, so I was switched to Flagyl. Within a week the diarrhea resolved, but then a week later it returned. Relapses are common with clostridium difficile colitis, so I tried Flagyl again, this time with a probiotic called Florastor. The diarrhea resolved and never came back.
A week later, however, the nausea did. It was absolutely crippling—as was the anxiety that accompanied it. What could
