Personal Narrative: Knocking On Death's Door

I did not know it at the time, but in November of 2005, I was knocking on death’s door. I was living in Naperville, IL with my girlfriend and her family. It was a few days before Thanksgiving, and the family was preparing for the holiday celebration. I was starting to feel a bit under the weather, but it was flu season.
It was the Monday before Thanksgiving. I was out of work at the time so I got up around nine o’clock. I wasn’t feeling well, like I had eaten something that just was not agreeing with me. So I rolled out of bed and went downstairs. My girlfriend and her mom were at the kitchen table working on decorations for the party they were hosting for the holiday.
“You want to help us make decorations?” asked my girlfriend.
“No

thanks.” I said, “I’m not feeling very well, I think I might go lay back down.”
So I went back upstairs to lie down but I could not fall asleep. I laid there and tossed and turned. My stomach hurt and was very cramped. I had a fever and cold sweats, and I felt like I had to go to the bathroom. The funny thing was when I would try to use the bathroom I would have no luck. I finally fell back to sleep when my girlfriend woke me up.
She asked, “Eric, are you hungry? My mom made dinner.”
“No thank you, I don’t think I could keep anything down,” I replied.
She responded, “Ok, well try to get some rest and let me know if you need anything.”
After struggling a bit longer, I finally got back to sleep and slept through the night. The next day I woke up and the symptoms I had been feeling the night before were getting worse. I was dizzy and nauseous, the cramps were worse, and I couldn’t stop vomiting even though there was nothing in my stomach. I was the only one home during the day so I had plenty of time to relax. Nothing I was doing was helping, so I went online to see if it could shed some light on my situation. I went on WebMD and typed in my symptoms. Based on what the site told me, I had gas, it told me I had a buildup of methane gas.
“What kind of horse crap is that?” I said, “There is no way this is just gas.”
I tried everything to make myself more comfortable, but nothing was working.

So when my girlfriend got home she tried the best she could to take care of me.
With a concerned look on her face, “I’m sorry babe, I wish there was something that I could do to make you feel better.”
“I’ll live,” I responded not feeling like I would, “I just have to fight through this fever.”
The pain was getting worse and worse and there was nothing that I could do to ease it even the slightest bit. By the end of the night I couldn’t even stand up straight. It was bed time so I got ready and lay down. I was in excruciating pain saying to myself, if I can just get to sleep I won’t have to deal with this pain anymore. I never got to sleep though. Sometime after midnight I woke up my girlfriend screaming at the top of my lungs in agony.
“Could you go get your mom?” I cried, “I can’t handle this anymore, we need to go to the hospital.”
“Ok, I’ll go get her,” she said jumping out of bed and running down the hall.
Her mom came into the room rubbing her eyes. “Is everything ok? What’s going on?”
“I can’t handle the pain anymore,” I cried again, “we need to go to the

hospital.”
They helped me get out of bed; walk down the stairs, and climbed into the car. It was the longest car ride I have ever been on, or at least it felt that way. When we finally got to the hospital my girlfriend got me a wheelchair and we went into the emergency waiting room. Her mom went to the receptionist.
“We brought him in for severe stomach pains, we need to see a doctor,” she said.
Handing her a clipboard, “Ok ma’am, fill out these forms and the doctor will see you shortly.”
We sat in the waiting room for 45 minutes, which to me felt like an eternity. There were three other individuals waiting and not a single person was in as bad a shape as I was. Finally my girlfriend’s mom went back up to front desk.
“Excuse me? We have been waiting here for almost an hour and he is sitting here in a lot of pain,” she told the receptionist with a bit of attitude.
She sounded nervous when she said, “Yes I know ma’am, and I am sorry for that, the doctor will be out to see you shortly.”
Not five minutes passed when a doctor came out to greet us. We went back into an examination room and I lay down on the table. The doctor started pushing and feeling around on my stomach, then he stopped.
“We are going to have to get him into surgery now!” he said with some panic in his voice.
I was then put under sedation and prepped for surgery. The surgery took just over three hours to complete. When I started to come out of sedation the first thing I could remember was the doctor coming into the room.
“That was a close one you were lucky you came in when you did, you appendix had ruptured at least a day ago” he said.
I told him, “I was trying to get some sleep hoping it would pass.”
“It’s a good thing you couldn’t get to sleep,” he said, “If you could have fallen asleep you probably would have died.”
My girlfriend asked, “Do you know what could have caused it?”
The doctor responded, “There isn’t anything in particular that causes it, it’s something that just kind of happens.”
I was speechless at that moment and couldn’t find the words to express how I was feeling. It took five staples to close me up and there was a drainage tube coming out of me to catch any extra infection that they may have missed. I spent a week in the hospital, including thanksgiving, which really sucks because I love turkey. When I finally got out of the hospital I was pretty much bed ridden for three months. After months of healing and physical therapy I was starting to be able to take care of myself again. The staples and the tube came out and I was able to do things on my own. After that life got back to normal, but not the same.
Still to this day I can’t fully wrap my head around how close I had come to dying. I cannot even touch my scar without the most uncomfortable feeling. After that horrendous experience I realized how precious life really is. Make each day count, it could be the last.