It started as something that felt like minor bloating.
At first, I did not think much of it. I am lactose intolerant, so stomach pain is not exactly new territory for me. I know what lactose pain feels like. It comes, causes trouble for a few minutes, and eventually leaves. I have learned to live around it, to almost ignore it.
This one did not leave.
The pain stayed for days. It followed me into bed and kept me awake at night. I would turn, adjust and try to find a position that made sense of it, but nothing worked. My body had become unfamiliar in a way I could not explain.
That was when I knew something was wrong.
My body was practically screaming at me.
At that point, everything else lost its importance. Work, projects, deadlines, even the feature I had been building and was supposed to ship the next day. None of it could compete with the fact that something inside me was no longer behaving normally.
My entire life had been reduced to one instruction: find out what is wrong and fix it.
So I went for a scan, and there it was.
An inflamed appendix.
I remember not being shocked.
Appendicitis had always lived somewhere in the back of my mind. It was one of those fears I carried because I had watched someone I loved go through it.
My mum had appendicitis when I was a child. I still remember fragments of that period. The pain she went through. The way illness changed her presence in the house. The recovery that seemed to continue long after the hospital visit was over.
So when the doctor confirmed my diagnosis, my mind did not go to statistics or medical explanations.
It went to inheritance.
One of the first things I asked him was whether appendicitis was hereditary. I needed to be sure we were not passing it down through generations like family property.
He said it was not hereditary.
I felt relieved.
Future generations, you are safe. I guess.
They carried out more tests and scans. Then the decision came quickly. Medication would not be enough. The appendix had to be surgically removed, and the operation needed to happen within the next 24 to 48 hours.
There was barely any time to think about it.
Within minutes, I had been admitted.
Needles. Fluids. Antibiotics. Instructions. People moving me from one bed to another while preparing me for surgery.
In the middle of all of it, I kept asking myself one simple question.
How did I get here?
The night before, I had been finishing a feature I built. I was preparing to launch it the next day. I remember the focus, the satisfaction of finally getting things right and the anticipation of releasing it.
Now it was the next day, and apparently, I was the one they wanted to launch.
Life comes at you very fast. 😭
For context, I had never been admitted into a hospital before. I had also not received a single injection since Primary 1.
That detail sounds small until you suddenly find yourself in a room where needles are no longer occasional. They are part of the routine.
So yes, the needles terrified me.
They scared the living shit out of me.
I was 28 years old, newly married, running businesses and building things, yet one nurse approaching me with a syringe was enough to make me question everything I believed about myself.
And oh… I received a lot of injections.
Enough to compensate for all the years I had somehow avoided them.
Nobody also told me that surgery came with several other procedures that would test every bit of dignity I thought I had. Had someone explained everything beforehand, I might have gone back home to negotiate with death directly.
Because……
What do you mean you are putting a tube through my penis?
What do you mean medication has to go through my anus?
What do you mean I cannot eat or drink anything until this entire thing is over?
I ended up going five days without food.
My wife, on the other hand, had the time of her life!
This woman turned my hospital stay into a full culinary exhibition. She cooked nearly every delicacy I could think of, made it her personal duty to bring the food straight to my ward, and then sat there eating it in front of me.
With full confidence.
No shame. No hesitation.
Meanwhile, I was air-feeding myself like a man participating in an advanced form of fasting he did not sign up for.
Very nice, Funke.
Very nice.
Five days without food is difficult to understand until you are actually living through it. After a while, hunger becomes less of an event and more of a background condition. It is simply there, reminding you that your body is operating under rules you did not create.
By then, however, it was too late to run.
I had come too far, and I remembered the pain that brought me there in the first place. The sleepless nights. The uncertainty. The way my body had insisted on being heard.
I could not let something this small take me out.
I had barely started my life.
I had just got married. My wedding anniversary was only two weeks away. I still had things I wanted to build. Ideas I had not explored. Work I had not completed.
I felt like I had not even reached five per cent of what I might be capable of. I was only beginning to understand myself and the things I could build with my life.
These were the thoughts running through my mind in fragments, between conversations, between movements, between moments of waiting as I watched urine leave my body and enter a bag attached to me without my permission.
Watching urine leave my body without my control is an experience I will probably never forget. I had never imagined that my body could simply decide to pee whenever it wanted, whether I agreed or not.
It removed any remaining illusion that I was fully in control of what happened to my body.
It was humiliating.
Then came the operating theatre. I thought I had already seen the worst of it.
Apparently, there were still more needles waiting for me.
Always more needles.
This time, the needle was not going into my arm.
It was going into my back!!!
Somewhere close enough to my spine for me to panic. I did not know the exact location, and at that point, I did not care. I just knew some large needles were heading towards my back.
I remember the heart rate monitor beeping so loudly and so fast. I thought I knew anxiety until that moment. The doctors even thought I might be becoming hypertensive. My wife was worried sick, asking, “Why is that machine beeping that fast? What is going on?”
I begged the doctor to make me unconscious throughout the procedure. I wanted to sleep, wake up and discover that everything had been completed while I was away.
Breeze in, breeze out.
They did not think that was the best option for me.
I was going to remain awake.
Wow.
I asked about the pain.
They explained that the anaesthesia would numb my body from my chest downward. I would not feel the operation, but I would also be unable to move my legs.
Basically, I would be temporarily paralysed.
I thought I understood what they meant until it actually happened.
I knew I had legs. I could see that my legs were still attached to me.
But I could not move them. Not even an inch.
I tried sending instructions from my brain.
“Dear brain, please send a signal and lift this leg.”
Nothing happened.
I tried again.
Nothing.
At some point, I stopped trying. That experience humbled me in a way I cannot fully explain.
I cried.
All I could feel was the cold. I could hear the surgeons talking and gisting while they worked. Their voices echoed around the room, almost like they were coming from somewhere far away.
I could sense movement inside my abdomen. I knew they were working on my body, yet I could not feel the pain that should have come with it.
My mind started going places I did not expect.
“Is this how people die?“
I felt completely alone.
I wanted to see my wife. I wanted to tell her I loved her one more time, just in case.
I did not know the mind could replay so much of a person’s life within such a short period.
People. Places. Decisions. Things I had done. Things I still wanted to do.
Memories appeared one after another.
The whole thing may have lasted around fifteen minutes, but it felt like four hours. It was the longest I had ever been awake while lying completely still.
I do not remember being lifted from the operating table. I only remember walls moving past me as they wheeled me away.
Later, I found myself begging a nurse to give me something that would make me sleep.
That was when I understood something I had never considered before.
Being able to feel pain is a gift.
That sentence would have sounded ridiculous to me before the surgery. Pain was always something I wanted to avoid. Something I wanted medication to remove.
Then I experienced complete numbness.
Numbness has its own kind of pain.
Your body is still there, yet it feels disconnected from you. Your mind keeps reaching for parts of yourself and receives nothing in return. You know your legs exist, but they no longer respond to you.
You begin to wish you could feel something, even if it hurt.
Pain at least tells you that your body is responding. It reminds you that something inside you is alive enough to complain.
A few days after I was discharged, I started reliving the experience.
The memories did not return like ordinary thoughts. They came with the fear attached to them.
I remembered the theatre. The numbness. The helplessness. The needles. The thought that I might not see my wife again.
It hit me like a bus. Life felt different afterward.
Things that had seemed incredibly important before the operation suddenly looked smaller. My routines, worries and constant need to keep moving had been interrupted by one small organ inside my body.
An appendix.
Something I barely thought about had brought everything to a stop.
I found myself asking God a question.
Did you allow me to go through this because I needed to be pulled out of the cycle I had been stuck in?
The constant work. The routines. The endless building. Moving from one project to another without giving myself much room to breathe, think or properly live.
Did my body have to scream because I had become too used to ignoring everything else?
I do not know the answer.
But if that was part of the reason, it worked.
And I am grateful.
I am alive.
That matters more to me now than it did before.
