One appendix, two operations. I'm going out now, but will tell the story later.
I was a cathedral choirboy, so went to the boarding choir school in Oxford. During the last night of the holidays, I woke screaming with pain, and my parents called the doctor out. He examined my belly, and eventually diagnosed that I had constipation and should return to school the next day as expected.
The pain subsided to a dull ache, but did not vanish; after a few days walking became somewhat uncomfortable, at least when processing into the cathedral. A swelling appeared on my tummy. I showed it to matron at bath time, and she told me to stop fussing. At the next weekend, when we were required to sit down and write home, my postcard (written in pencil - I still have it somewhere) said that I was still uncomfortable.
When my parents got the card, they rang the school and insisted that I was taken to see the doctor. So I was fetched out of class and walked the half mile to the doctor's surgery. He examined me and pronounced that I had appendicitis, and arranged for me to go to hospital. I walked back to school to change and wait for the ambulance, which was not an emergency one, but the one doing the rounds picking up old ladies for their routine appointments. At the hospital outpatients area I was put on a trolley and after a while they wheeled me through to inpatient admissions. There I had to be transferred to a different trolley, so I swung my legs over the edge to get off, and they shouted at me: "DON'T MOVE!", and then lifted me across. Basically, I had an appendix abscess so large they were worried it might burst if I moved - and I been walking around town half the morning.
They operated that evening, and decided that complete removal would be too much shock to the system; instead, they opened up the abscess and put in a "drain" (actually a length of corrugated plastic to keep the wound open). I had injections of penicillin and streptomycin in my bottom for week (this was 1958, so antibiotics were still rather a new thing); fortunately the strep didn't damage my hearing, which I now know to be its major side-effect. Anyway, the drain was in place for several weeks, being cut shorter as the size of the abscess reduced, but I was kept in hospital until no more pus was appearing, and the wound had finally been allowed to close up. I was in hospital for six weeks (maybe eight - my memory has got confused). Forty-six years later, I got a new job (my present one) which was in the same hospital (which is now closed).
A year later I went back to a small local hospital to have my appendix removed; I was there for six days. (When my son's appendix was removed, he was in for two days - such has been the change in the way recovery is handled.) My recovery from this operation was slower than expected, and my family doctor redeemed himself by deciding to send me to a specialist who confirmed that I now had TB. It had been caught early, so I was not infectious, and it was cured by six months treatment using antibiotics; however, the school doctor decided that he could not risk the other boys, and I was thrown out of school. Shortly after I got to my new school, nine months later (off-games on arrival!) I got a hernia, which was operated on later that term. I had chest x-rays to check the TB didn't recur for the next five years.
