TIFU by thinking my burst appendix was just gluten

After seeing the Coeliac post I thought I should post this as a cautionary tale.

First off I’ll add the obligatory ‘this didn’t today’, this actually happened in mid 2020 in the height of COVID.

So to start with I need to say that I have coeliac disease which means my body starts attacking itself if I eat gluten. Typically if I eat gluten I have a reaction similar to food poisoning and within 30-60 mins of eating everything goes through me and then I feel like I’ve been beaten up for the next 24 hours.

Another side effect of being coeliac is that we are forced to eat below par food constantly. One thing I had been missing was crumpets and so my wife decided to be a darling and she made home made crumpets. After we had eaten them she realised that she used the wrong soy milk and it actually contained gluten. Typically I react from just a few crumbs so I braced for impact.

After a few hours nothing had happened (pleasantly surprised) so I went to bed as normal.

At around 2am I woke in excruciating pain. I tried unsuccessfully to go to the toilet and then basically spent the rest of the night curled up in a ball of pain. This wasn’t my normal reaction to gluten but I assumed that had to be the cause as I knew I had some.

By the morning there was no improvement. I had a physio appointment booked in for a my sore back and was meant to be leaving for a holiday at lunch time so I started to proceed with my day as normal despite the pain. This resulted in a very very painful physio appointment where I lay on my stomach as my back was massaged before I lay on the floor again in pain.

After a few hours I gave in and delayed the holiday and headed to the doctors. I explained the gluten situation and the pain and the doctor sent me urgently to the hospital with a note and said it could be my appendix.

Once I got to the hospital I started to tell them the same story. By this point my wife was getting annoyed that I kept suggesting it was gluten (and that she had given it to me). But because I was used to gut pain I must have seemed reasonably chill (despite being at level 10 pain) and as a male in my early thirties I was naturally bumped down the list over and over at the hospital. So it was a good 8 hours before I had a scan and then another 16 hours or so before anything was really don’t to fix me. By this point I was hallucinating and vomiting bile uncontrollably.

Long story slightly shorter, my appendix had burst and turned necrotic and I had free fluid throughout my abdomen. This lead to 8 very painful days in hospital (my body was so wrecked that I couldn’t actually feel the incision sites over the rest of the pain) where I walked around with a tube coming out of my stomach draining fluids into a clear bottle.

Once I was finally out of hospital (they actually tried to send me home incorrectly days early without antibiotics which would probably have killed me, but that’s another story but make sure if something doesn’t feel right to ask the question like I did) I had several months of recovery to be able to live normally again. Before I went in I was a very fit competitive runner and it took me over a month before I could walk around the block afterwards.

Moral of the story. If you have a chronic illness don’t just assume that your pain is that.

TL;DR: I have coeliac disease and thought I was sick because I ate gluten when in reality my appendix had burst which resulted in over 24 hours of extreme pain and months of recovery.