The trouble started a couple of days before August. I had driven Henry to my mom's house early one morning, and I came home to find Liam throwing up. Over the course of that morning, he threw up at least 15 times. I got alarmed, so I took him to the urgent care center, where the doctor told us it was a virus and he should go home and rest and hydrate. So that's what we did. I bought him every conceivable beverage and soft food to tempt him, and we waited for him to get better. He said his abdomen hurt, but he thought it was just muscle soreness from all the vomiting.
On August 1, he was supposed to move back to campus to start his RA training, but he was still so sick. We went back and forth about what to do, and finally Mike remembered that we have access to a different clinic through his job, so he came home from work and took Liam there. He saw a nurse practitioner, and she told us that something more was definitely going on and he needed a CT scan. She started the long process to get insurance approval, but we decided to just take him straight to the ER in South Bend. By the time we got there, Liam was in bad shape. He could barely walk on his own. At the entrance to the ER, there was a bank of wheelchairs. He sat down in one while I got him registered, and he didn't get back up.
They got him registered and into a room pretty quickly, then took him back for a CT scan. After that, a nurse came and started him on IV antibiotics. She confirmed what we had been thinking: appendicitis. She said the doctor was still looking at the scan, so depending on what he found, Liam would have surgery either that night or the next morning. And the next thing we knew, there were TWO doctors in the room to tell us that not only did he have appendicitis, but that his appendix had ruptured and had been leaking into his abdomen. They took him back for surgery right away, and Mike and I waited. At that time of night, we were the only ones in the surgical waiting room.
The surgeon finally came to let us know Liam was in recovery. "That was really bad," he told us. It was the first time but far from the last time the doctor would tell us that. He showed us pictures of the appendix to illustrate how bad it was (not that either of us really have any frame of reference for that). He said he did his best to clean out everything that had been leaked into Liam's abdomen, and he had placed a surgical drain to collect anything that may have been left.
Liam was in the hospital for five days after the surgery. He was so sick, so weak, and he couldn't eat anything. He developed a complication called ileus, where (based on my limited understanding) his digestive system was not coming back online after the trauma of the surgery. He got really good care, but the initial infection was just really bad. By the fifth day, he could tolerate a few bites of food, so he got discharged with his drain still in place so he could come home and recover for the rest of that week.
At home, he was exhausted and lethargic. He could barely eat a bite or two of food at a time, and most of the time he would throw up whatever he had eaten. His drain, which had been collecting decreasing amounts of clear fluid (which is what you want!) suddenly started filling up with cloudy, smelly, thick fluid. This, it turns out, was because he had an abscess, a collection of infectious fluid at the site where the appendix had been removed. After a few days, the drainage had slowed way down, and his surgeon felt comfortable removing the drain and letting Liam go back to school. The vomiting was still a concern (Liam vomited in the office before the surgeon had even left the room!) but the hope was that he would just get better on his own.
His drain came out on a Thursday, and we moved him back to school on Saturday, August 17. Day 17 after surgery, and he still couldn't keep much food down. But classes started that Monday, and he was determined not to miss anything. He was also really worried about his RA job and felt like he had so much to catch up on. We talked several times over the weekend, and he was tired but said he was doing ok.
On Monday, things got worse. Max called me specifically to tell me how worried he was. He said Liam could barely eat a few blueberries without throwing up. He said "he just looks so bad, Mom." Liam himself was texting me, telling me that just getting to classes was the hardest thing he has ever done. He was thinking about just coming home and taking a gap semester or even a gap year. He felt like his life was ruined and that he was losing everything he had worked so hard for. That night, I had Mike call his uncle Ken, a retired doctor, because I felt like surely something else must be going on. Ken said he agreed, and he recommended that we get Liam in to see the surgeon in the next day or two.
It was 10:30 at night by then, and I decided I couldn't wait another second, so we got in the car, and I drove us to campus, with Mike in the passenger seat calling the on-call surgeon to see what we could do. They said they could see Liam the next day, but he should be all right to wait. We got to campus around midnight, and Max was waiting outside for us. He and Mike went upstairs and helped Liam out to the car. He was incredibly sick again, almost as bad as the first time we took him to the ER. We got him home at 2:30 in the morning, and he tried to rest a little bit.
We finally got in to see the on-call surgeon (our surgeon was in London for the week) in Elkhart a little after noon. He started to examine Liam, and raised his shirt to check his incision sites, and I gasped because I could see how swollen he was. The surgeon told us to head over to the hospital to register for a CT scan, and we were almost there when he came running down the hall behind us to escort us into the ER instead. It turns out that when a surgeon brings you to the ER and asks them to expedite registration, things happen pretty quickly. Before we knew it, Liam had a room in the ER and had been taken for a CT scan, which revealed an abscess the size of a football (!!) in his abdomen.
That day, he had a second surgery. For this one, they kept him in the CT scanner while an interventional radiologist drained the abscess and put in another surgical drain. They drained a full liter of fluid that day. Again, I don't have a lot of context, but my understanding is that this is A Lot. He felt better immediately after they finished. They got him up to a regular room, and he spent another day in the hospital. He had a very scary reaction right after we got to the room where he started shaking uncontrollably for a full 15 minutes -- the doctor said this was basically his body trying to adjust to the sudden lack of the abscess. It was terrifying to watch. I have never been happier to see anyone than I was to see my brother walk in at minute 14. He was at the hospital on a paramedic call, and he just popped upstairs for a minute to check on us.
After he was released from the hospital a second time, Liam came home for the rest of the week to recover. I did have to take him back to campus one day for a meeting he couldn't miss, plus a quick stop at the bookstore for his textbooks. He was still really weak by then but getting visibly stronger. He was able to start eating again pretty quickly after that too -- it turns out that having that abscess against his intestines was what was causing all the vomiting. The following Monday, I took him back for bloodwork, a follow-up visit with the surgeon, and a repeat CT scan to make sure everything was healing and nothing else had developed. He got cleared to go back to campus again, so Mike took him back Monday night, then went back to get him Wednesday night. Thursday morning, Avalon took him back to Elkhart, where he had his drain removed, and then I took him back to campus. That Thursday marked day 29 since his initial surgery, and 31 days since our first visit to the urgent care center.
His drain has been out for a week now, and he's gotten stronger every day. He says he still feels a little fragile on the inside. He's been working so hard to get caught up with his classes and all of his RA duties, and he finally feels like he's on decent footing with both.
Those are the facts. But no matter how hard I try or what words I choose, I'll never really be able to capture what this past month has been like emotionally. I had a lot of quiet time with Liam in the hospital and at home. A lot of time just watching him sleep and being grateful for every single breath, while being hyperaware of how badly things could have gone with even one different decision at any point. He is a grown man, but he is still my child. My first baby. During all that quiet time, I thought about a great many things, different futures spread out before us, the ways life can turn on a dime. It is going to take a very long time to recover from the trauma of this month, but we are so very lucky, because time is something we still have.
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