Ouch.

The other night I woke up at 4am, violently ill. There is nothing lonelier or more frightening than being sick in the middle of the night, all by yourself.

Fortunately (I guess), this isn't the first time this has happened to me, so I wasn't quite as panicked. This time, I was past the worst of it and back in bed — shaken, but basically ok — within a few hours.

Last time, I called 911.

I thought my appendix was bursting and I was going to die on my bathroom floor and no one would even know for days and then who was going to feed the cat? It turned out to only be either gastritis or a ruptured ovarian cyst (the doctors' certainty on this issue was really reassuring...), and I was out of the emergency room about 8 hours later. I felt like my stay had been interminably long, but a more seasoned Brooklynite friend of mine was impressed with the turnaround time: "They let you go the same day? How? Did you break out of there with the help of a rogue orderly and a weapon made out of tongue depressors?"

Earlier, though, I had spent most of the ambulance ride crying, from both the sudden, severe pain, and out of sheer self-pity for being all alone. Luckily, in a flash of momentary clarity, I had remembered to grab my cell phone on the way out of the apartment — I forgot my health insurance card, but I remembered my phone — and thankfully, my misery was lessened through an abundance of text message exchanges with my concerned family. Even from far away, they always find ways to remind me how much I love them. This missive from my brother being a prime example:

"Ms. Godan, we have your results, and there seems to be a small family of frogs inhabiting your abdominal cavity. Even stranger, the tests show that one of them is the reincarnation of the late Senator Paul Tsongas."

Just what I needed to hear. :)

Two Things No Woman Should Ever Have To Hear From A Medical Professional (Guys, You've Been Warned...)

1. From an ER physician during a manual vaginal exam: "What is that?"
2. From a comically accented Asian sonographer proffering a probe resembling a very large, lubed-up dildo: "I need you to insert this into your own vagina."

Well, thank God she specified my own and not somebody else's, 'cause that might have been embarrassing...