Fixing the Fear

From the time I was in kindergarten, I knew I wanted to be a police officer. As a kid, I would ride my bicycle down the block and jump it off the curb while humming the theme to CHiPs. I would watch cop shows like Adam-12 and dream of taking bad guys to jail. Then of course I wanted to be just like the cops on Miami Vice.

Everything changed one sunny summer South Florida day. I was with my dad while he was on an air-conditioning service call. I was out in the van, cooling a fan motor using the van's air conditioner. My dad had sent me out to cool it off so he could handle it to reinstall it.

I was doing what any 14-year-old kid would do in the driveway with a running vehicle: I would put it in reverse and move a few feet, then do the same forward. All of a sudden, the front door of the residence opened, and I knew I was busted. My dad appeared to peek out, but he didn't come out, and the door closed.

A few moments later I saw my dad stumble out the door. Clutching his right arm against his chest, he fell to his knees. I dropped the fan motor and ran to see what was going on. He told me he had been "shocked." I was scared to death--I had no idea of the address where we were. My dad was confused and losing consciousness. He was unable to tell me the address.

In West Palm Beach, 9-1-1 was new at the time. I dialed it and told them what I could. I distinctly recall how relieved I felt when the operator told me help was on the way. When the ALS unit arrived, its crew began to care for my dad.

One of the most vivid memories I have of that day is of a paramedic putting his hand on my shoulder and telling me to call my mother. He told me to tell her they were taking my dad to St. Mary's. Then he told me he was going to "take care" of my dad. I was really scared, and those few words from that medic made me feel as though he were really going to fix things. It wasn't just the spoken words; it was the way he said them. For me, he fixed some fears that day.

After this incident I wanted to become a paramedic--to pay back the powers that be, so to speak. I later became an EMT and worked for the very service that cared for my father so many years prior. In 1995 I finally became a police officer too, but I never stopped being a paramedic.

Flash forward to December 2010. I woke up on a Saturday morning at 0500 with abdominal pain. My wife was out of town, and I had our boys at home. I went status quo all day with the cramping in my stomach. That night, as I went to bed, I got nervous. What if it's my appendix and it ruptures in the middle of the night? Man, I don't want my boys to find me dead in bed. So I did what most men do: I lay in bed until I fell asleep.

Experiencing this abdominal pain, I couldn't help thinking back to 1994, when I was working in a rural ER one day and a 16-year-old boy came in complaining of abdominal pain. My assessments of him led me to believe he was having appendicitis. Sure enough, the MD and tests confirmed it. The ER was relatively slow that night, and I spent a little time with the boy and his family. I talked to him about him high school football and such. When it came time for him to be taken to surgery, he and his family asked if I would go in with him. I was a bit taken aback by the request, but I went. The next few minutes kind of gave me a phobia of the word appendectomy: As the surgery began, just as the surgeon made the incision, the kid's appendix burst. That wouldn't have been so bad, but the some of the contents of the appendix, which had been under so much pressure, flew up and landed on the surgeon's mask. Now I got to observe all the contents of this kid's abdominal cavity picked up, moved and cleansed prior to being closed back up. That, now, is my fond memory of the concept of an appendectomy.