The time was mid-2009 or 2010, I can’t quite remember which. Both of them were mediocre years to say the least, what with lots of various family drama that would come to define me, just as much as the experience I was about to have, as a more serious individual. The setting was my old house, the last real house I lived in, not the apartment or trailer that followed. I was laying sideways on the big, tattered beige couch in the brown-walled, brown-carpeted, white-shelved living room I remember so fondly, and I was playing videogames, another thing that would come to define me today and my plans for my future career. Specifically, I was playing a version of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 on the PlayStation 2, and I got around halfway through the game during that play session; at one point I was so immersed that I had managed to start ignoring the crippling pain I had been experiencing in my lower abdomen. Not crippling in terms of pain intensity, per se, moreso because it made the lower half of my torso feel very stiff and kind of swollen, rendering me unable to do little more than limp for those several days like the old man I’m destined to become one day.
My Sonic 2 session was interrupted by the time I got to Hill Top Zone. My mother arrived home, having finally decided to take me to the doctor’s office after, unlike all the other times, multiple days and ibuprofen hadn’t solved the problem. I distinctly remember my mom parking on the opposite side of the parking lot from the building when there were clearly spaces left that were closer and more convenient for my hardly-walking body. I bring it up every so often to make her feel guilty, which I suppose exemplifies how childish I can still be. I didn’t really know what to expect, I had never considered the possibility of me actually contracting some kind of serious disease, which goes to show how close-minded I was then compared to now. And strangely, I made absolutely no assumption as to how it might turn out, either; I was totally clueless.
So after a bunch of boring clinic stuff I don’t really remember, like various different scans in those little capsules they always slide you into, I was laying down in some strange bed in a part of the building I had never seen, totally unsuspicious and bored by the wait. I was soon informed that I had appendicitis, which is a really stupid disease in retrospect. The swelling and eventual bursting of a worthless organ. The only two things the appendix is known to do are both tied to appendicitis: kill you when you don’t get it removed, and make it incredibly painful to walk and use the bathroom after after it’s gone, otherwise it does nothing we know of, but we know it’s nothing important, supposedly being worthless because of evolution. Seeing from the look on my face that my automatic reflex to being loaded into an ambulance was me thinking “I’M GONNA DIE”, the guy inside with me and my mom told me it’s actually fairly common, and while that helped me feel a bit better at the time, I feel now that it was a dumb way to try and make me feel better about a potentially fatal disease.
I remember that ambulance ride fairly vividly. Having thought about disease and injury very little before this point, I asked my mom “What other injuries or diseases have my siblings had?” Apparently none of my 5 brothers or 2 sisters had any serious disease such as mine, the only substantial injury my mom thought of was when my sister Tori broke her leg dancing when she was young, and I recall my brother Isaac had a concussion while playing basketball at Asbury University in Kentucky a while later. Perhaps it was these things, as well as my own laziness, that caused me to be averse to sports. I remember brief crying during the trip, although not for the reasons you might’ve guessed. It was mainly because my mom had called people to know where we were, and she relayed my brother Jameson’s “I love you” message to me, and he had never told me that before. Granted he was never around to, he had moved out a while before I was sentient (as in any point after my earliest memory), so I had never really even thought about it. It’s experiences like this that make you think. Only a little while later, I was at the hospital, waiting to be treated.
The hospital was pretty nice, all white and shiny as usual, and the staff was nice if I remember correctly. I remember the light-blue curtains of the room I was in before the operating room, where they were explaining the operation to me, and my unusual lack of fear which today I still cannot explain. I also vaguely recall exiting the operation room, I think. I hope not. Waking up in a bed with a tube in my torso wasn’t great, and getting it taken out while still conscious was similarly unfun. The food: mediocre, which was better than what I expected, but better than my next trip to the hospital where it was bad to the point of sadness one would think too genuine and disheartening to apply to mere food. As I recovered I watched Paul Blart: Mall Cop for a while before dozing off, my mom and dad both slept rested in the chairs around me. Also, for those who have never had appendicitis, going to the bathroom becomes like giving birth. However, despite that, I was doing that in the actual bathroom as well as walking faster than most do early on, and I’m still surprised I ever had the strength to make an early recovery, a self-imposed lack of confidence I still retain. Within a month, I was on my way back home in the dead of night, with my mom and dad, probably discussing something unimportant like it all had never happened, as we usually do.
And that’s how disease and injury became my two worst fears. That along with everything else I mentioned goes to show how I’ve become more paranoid, but at the same time more open-minded and cautious about life. I recently looked up the meaning of my name, and apparently Keegan means that I “see things in the big picture,” which I suppose is accurate to how I like to look at things, as well as how I usually to observe myself in a third-person manner, which makes writing a memoir like this fairly natural.