By Joan Bunting, November 21, 2019 — When I was twelve years of age, I was attacked with appendicitis. Within two months after the operation, I developed an infection. Before I started having pain that night, my siblings and I had been eating raw peanuts all day.
When the pain had gotten so bad I started moaning and groaning. But the pain was getting worse every minute. My mother took me to the emergency room. The young intern told my mother that there was nothing wrong with me and that I just wanted attention. He gave me a dose of medicine, told her to put a hot water bottle to my stomach, and sent us home.
As I was about to go up the steps into the house I threw up the medicine. The pain got worse than it was before and my mother searched the rest of the night for her hot water bottle. She could not find it to save her life.
Now it was daybreak and the pain was so, so bad. Back to the hospital we went again. By then the head doctor was there. He examined me and wanted to know who was the doctor who told her to apply a hot water bottle to my stomach. She did not know his name and could not identify him. He told her that it was a good thing she could not find the hot water bottle because if she applied it to my stomach it would have busted the pus bag that had developed from the infection, it would have poisoned my system and that would have been the last of me on this Earth.