Another triumph for medical science

All of a sudden Saturday night (actually early Sunday morning), I had a sharp pain on the left side of my lower back. I mean sharp. Since it came on suddenly very soon after I had finished a hard-fought broomball game, I at first thought I had somehow managed to pull a muscle or something, but since I hadn't been playing that hard, I discounted that theory and decided it was somehow digestive system-related.

I made it home, despite not being able to find a comfortable sitting position in the driver's seat of my car. I took Pepto-Bismol and Tylenol and tried lying down, but couldn't find a comfortable position there, either. The pain continued, and I alternated between tossing and turning in bed and making trips to the bathroom to see if, uh, anything needed to come out. At one point, I checked webmd.com to verify that I was correctly remembering that appendicitis causes sharp pain on the right side, and it turned out I was.

I thought about putting clothes on and driving to the hospital, but I figured that since I wasn't bleeding profusely, I'd just have to sit around for several hours waiting to be seen, and I'd be even less comfortable in public than I was lying in bed. Then I remembered that my health insurance plan had just sent out information about their exciting new 24-hour "ask a nurse or counselor or whoever happens to answer the phone" service, so I decided that if the pain hadn't subsided by 3:00, I'd go ahead and call and see what they said.

At 2:58, I felt the pain suddenly start going away, and it was completely gone within one minute. I fell asleep almost immediately, and felt perfectly fine when I woke up Sunday morning.

I still feel fine, I have no idea what the problem was, and I'm glad I didn't actually go to the hospital and waste everyone's time and the aforementioned insurance company's money. Maybe it really was some bizarre broomball-related muscle strain that cleared up once the Tylenol got to work on it.

On another note, on Saturday, I got a snail-mail letter from my Congressional representative responding to an e-mail supporting Amtrak that I sent four months ago. I'm glad certain pain relievers in "capsule" form work a little bit faster than my representative's communications department. (I sent similar e-mails to both my senators, and got a generic "thanks for sharing your views" e-mail back from one a week later, and still haven't gotten anything back from the other one. I happen to know they're both in favor of Amtrak, though.)