One night when I was 18, like a couple months before I turned 19, I was having a fitful nightmare. And mind you, I didn’t have nightmares yet because I hadn’t gone to aircraft mechanic school by that point. I woke up extremely nauseous and with terrible abdominal pain. I staggered into the bathroom and puked my guts out. This wasn’t something I ate or some stomach flu, this was different. I couldn’t stand up for the pain in my midsection. I convinced my mother to drive me to the hospital, where they gave me Maalox.

For 18 months this went on, every now and again once or twice a month just BOOM, always at night, no apparent reason. We ruled out food allergies, I was prescribed everything from muscle relaxants to migraine medications. This interfered with my aviation medical certificate, I was grounded for ten months.

I was at University, away from my home town, and it happened again. One of my roommates drove me to a different hospital. The doc at the ER was a young chick with a nose ring, like I’m barely 20 by this time and she didn’t feel much older than me, she hadn’t been out of med school long. She had the bright idea to put me in a CT scanner while my tummy was actually hurting.

About 45 minutes later I was being whisked into an operating room to have my appendix removed, and the early morning thunderpukes never returned.

I had appendicitis for 18 months.