Emergency appendectomy

Well, July certainly started off with a bang. On the second, Tim came home early from work complaining of a sore stomach. He asked if any of the rest of us felt sick but we were all fine so he spent lots of time in the bathroom and rested, hoping to feel better. That evening, after the kids were in bed, he still felt awful and from his resting place on the couch he asked, "Katie, do you know which side the appendix is on?" I told him I didn't but said something like, "But I don't think it's your appendix because I think you'd be crying from the pain." Ughh, famous last words.
Our friend and neighbor is a Nurse Practitioner so we called him that night and he came over to have a look at Tim. He checked a couple things and said that it could in fact be Tim's appendix but he couldn't really say for certain without some blood work and a scan of Tim's abdomen. He did say that his wife had been really sick a week or so ago with similar symptoms. He said if the pain continued we should head to the ER. We really didn't want to go to the ER for various and probably lame reasons: we didn't want to get there, have them check Tim and then have it just be a stomach bug with a $500 ER bill attached to it. We didn't want it to be his appendix. Probably on some level we hoped that given some time it would all go away. We are so dumb.
Tim had a rough night but went to work the next morning, anyway. Around lunch or so he called me and got our family doc's number. A few minutes later he called me back and said the family doc had told him to go to the ER so he was heading over there. The rest of his afternoon was spent getting blood work and having a cat scan. The ruling: appendix. The plan: emergency appendectomy that evening. The surgery was scheduled for eight so my sis-in-law came over and I headed over to the hospital. He didn't actually go in until 9:30 because it was a busy night in the OR, but the surgery went well and was done in an hour, though again, because of the busy night, he didn't get to his room until midnight or so.
Tim spent the night in the hospital and was such a wonderful and well-behaved patient that he got to come home the next morning. We picked him up and the boys enjoyed seeing his bed and incisions and playing in the window well of his eighth floor room. His employers were really nice about the whole thing and his 4th of July weekend turned into more of a week. Luckily, he healed up pretty quickly because on July 6 Marcus was baptized and we had a lot of people come into town for that big event.
Never a dull moment around here.