Wednesday, November 16, 8:30 AM. Brewer.

Garrett is sleeping soundly following an emergency appendectomy Amy and I did on him this morning. Claire and Trevor are out taking care of the animals. Amy is weeping uncontrollably on the bar in the kitchen. I have to just let her.

I don’t have the energy right now to lay out all the details, though I feel like it would help to get it off my mind and might be useful for future reference. But here’s the overview.

Garrett woke us up early this morning with pain in his lower right abdomen. Amy immediately suspected appendicitis. At first I thought it couldn’t be but when I looked it up in our medical manuals, he had all the symptoms. It was the right location and sensitive to pressure. Vomiting. Low fever. I realized if it was appendicitis we had to operate. There was no other choice. I’d been reading about that the other day.

This made me think about anesthetic. I thought we could probably use nitrous oxide and Novocaine because we’ve seen it done at the dentist office enough times. Amy used to give herself allergy shots, so she could probably do Novocaine. I went to town to get those from the dentist’s. We already had scalpels and needles and suture thread from our previous raids of the doctors’ offices. We never knew when we might need them. I never thought it would be this soon.

I got back about 5:30. Garrett was in bad pain. He told us he knew it was appendicitis and asked us to operate.

Amy and I looked at the medical books. We reviewed the steps and the diagrams. We couldn’t believe what we were thinking about doing. We decided to give ourselves half an hour to prepare. His appendix could burst at any moment but we had probably caught it early, and anyway the risk of it bursting wasn’t as bad as the risk of us going in not knowing what we were doing.

The hardest part was going to be the sutures. Amy got some thick flannel cloth, as much like skin as we could find, and we practiced cutting and sewing it a few times.

At 6:20 we set him up on a camping bed in the media room upstairs. We went there so that the little kids wouldn’t disturb us when they woke up, plus it has a sink and water. He showed us where the pain was worst. That was to make the incision. Amy gave him nitrous oxide while I scrubbed up and cleaned his belly. He got loopy right away and then he started laughing. I was afraid his movements would make it impossible to work, but he stopped after a minute. We wondered about using the nitrous oxide alone but decided to go ahead with the Novocaine. I helped him with the gas while Amy made six small injections around the place where we would cut.

We swapped places and I got ready to cut him. I almost couldn’t do it. I asked Amy to pray with me, and she agreed. We held hands and asked God to help us.

I poked him with the scalpel, not really a cut, but to see if he would react. He kept humming and smiling as if nothing had happened. I made a small cut, as if you’d been scratched by a nail. A little blood came up, and he still showed no reaction. I took a deep breath.

I told myself I was just going to draw into his skin with the knife, like a pen stroke.

Then I did it. About four inches long, right over the site.

I didn’t go deep enough. I was too afraid of cutting whatever was behind the skin. I made another cut, and this time I could tell I was opening the skin fully and just the skin. I looked at Amy, and she was green. She fixed her eyes on his face and whispered soft sounds to him to keep him calm. He didn’t seem to notice what I was doing.

There wasn’t as much blood as I feared. I blotted it up as best I could. I opened the wound and saw the appendix. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to look like but it was red and round like a radish.

After cutting his skin, cutting his appendix wasn’t so scary. I asked Amy to put a couple more shots of Novocaine in it in case that would hurt. She didn’t like working inside the wound but she was brave. We had boiled a couple of shoe spoons that we used to keep him open.

Before cutting off the appendix I tried stitching it closed. My fingers were slippery and I was just too clumsy. I had thought that might be a problem and had persuaded Amy to practice it before. She likes to sew and I knew she could do it. I monitored the gas and helped clean the wound while she tied the appendix off. I think she did a great job. Claire woke up and tried to come in while she was doing it. I think we scared her pretty bad. But she’ll be all right.

After that I took off his appendix with no trouble.

Once he was all closed up we fell back and cried together.

I’m optimistic. As I’ve been reminded recently, we don’t know what we don’t know. I think we did everything good enough. When I think about how the wounds I’ve had on the outside of my body heal up, how the skin closes and melds together, I think what we did to him should heal up fine. I just pray he doesn’t get an infection. We scrubbed really good and used iodine everywhere and wore masks and hairnets and everything we could think of. But even real surgeries get infected sometimes. I just pray this one doesn’t.