Update

Dropped by the hospital to see how technocollie was doing.  He was in quite a bit of pain last night, though from what he was telling me the discomfort before he got to the hospital was mainly in his spine and relatively tolerable compared to the discomfort he had after surgery.  Last night he told the nurse that on a scale of 1 to 10, his pain was at roughly a 6 or 7.  He didn't say how bad it was today, though.

Today he was doing much better... though apparently mostly bored.  I think if he had his computer and his phone he would have been online for a pretty good chunk of the night.  He also told me he talked to the surgeon this morning, and from what he was told his appendix ruptured just as they were removing it.  Fortunately they cleaned out the infectious material so no complications resulted.  But had they not gotten to him in time, he would have likely been in a drug-induced coma for probably a few months while the infection was cleared out.

Still, though, he got through the whole thing with only a relatively minor scar and short-lived discomfort.  Today he told me that he had mostly stomach and intestinal gas pain caused mainly by incomplete digestion.  He also mentioned that he has another round of antibiotics and that he hopes to be released from the hospital by either tomorrow or Friday.  I'm hoping for tomorrow myself so I can at least visit for a little longer.

I didn't get a chance to visit as long as I would have liked because I left work later than planned... a late visit by one of the attendees of the weather conference going on this week kept me at work a half hour later than I wanted.  That plus traffic got me to the hospital around 5:15pm and I was only able to stay for an hour before going to a squadron dinner at 6 (yes, I was late, if you do the math, but that wasn't a big deal as we didn't actually sit down to eat until almost 7).

While I kept finding myself thinking about how technocollie was doing the past few days (even though I didn't lose sleep over it except perhaps for Monday night when he went into the ER), his mom had supposedly overreacted.  Seems as though when she was describing his condition to a family friend, she made it sound as though he was nearly at death's door.  That person mentioned that he half-expected technocollie to be out -- possibly in a coma? -- with an IV tube attached to him.  As it turns out, while technocollie did have an IV needle inserted in his hand, he wasn't even on an IV last night since he was already on solid food.  And besides, I'd seen him in much worse shape before, like about 2 years ago, when he had a blood infection (I think even ionotter remembers that because it was just before and after FC).

So at least the good news is that technocollie dodged a bullet and avoided what could have been a very bad situation.