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Appendicitis
February 11, 2008 |
Recently Sergio Munoz experienced some strange pain in his abdominal area. “It was
very uncomfortable pain it wasn’t necessarily a sharp pain it was just uncomfortable
to walk. I couldn’t stand up in a certain way or lean in a certain way. It was if
I had a bubble in my groin area,” says Sergio. Because he wasn’t in extreme pain
he decided not to go to a physician right away. He says, “ I laid down thinking
maybe it would go away and as the time went by it just got worse and worse so I
had to go to the ER.” Dr. Larry Hobbs is the Director of Emergency Medicine at Southwest
Florida Regional Medical Center. He says, “In general anyone that has abdominal
pain that is either around the umbilicus or the belly button and or in the right
lower quadroon of the abdomen probably needs to be evaluated by a physician.” Physicians
decided to keep Sergio in the hospital and watch his condition to see if it worsened.
Dr. Hobbs says that is a very common way to handle the condition at first. “Sometimes
the appendix isn’t that inflamed it might be minimally inflamed and the surgeon
might elect to watch the patient and put him on antibiotics and put him in the hospital
and do frequent exams.” Once physicians knew it was appendicitis they decided to
operate. Sergio says it was an unnerving
experience at first. “When I went in there
I was scared because I never had any kind of operation before or any kind of treatment
or anything like that.” In the end the appendectomy procedure was successful in
stopping the pain. “The recovery process wasn’t a very long one it took about a
week after the operation for me to be able to go back home,” Sergio says. The very
young and elderly are most susceptible to developing appendicitis. Most patients
take one to two weeks to fully recover from an appendectomy. |
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