Appendectomy

POSTED JUNE 1, 2016 - by Dina Silver

The good news was I got to have a fantastic evening out with my 18 year old son who was home for a couple of weeks appreciating a stocked fridge and on-site laundry that did not require coins.  The bad news was the evening ended with an appendectomy—mine.  You just never know what’s around the corner.

As it turned out, I was lucky—my appendix had not yet ruptured so the surgery was straightforward and frankly, pretty easy.  I imagined the recovery would be tough—imagining my anguish moving from sitting to standing or lying down.  I would have liked to milk the sympathy for a solid week and let worried family and friends hover and tote and do for me, but the truth was, I really wasn’t in much pain at all.  I had to recalibrate:  my preconceptions of a tough recovery from abdominal surgery didn’t match the truth of my experience—I was home the next day and out to dinner the next night.  And asleep by 8:30pm.

By day, when I’m not lining the pockets of surgeons, I work to help leaders magnify their impact and set a clear and decisive course for their teams and companies.  I get the chance to work up close and over time with my clients, and I see them in periods of stress as well as times of ease and celebration.  Ever since they took my appendix away, I’ve started to look at when my clients may be over-reacting.  When are they so primed for a negative result that they fail to notice that what is actually occurring isn’t so bad?  How much stress might be taken out of tough situations by merely stepping back for a moment and honestly asking the question:  How might I be blowing this out of proportion? Or, Am I responding in a manner that matches what’s really happening?

The truth about appendixes is that you don’t need them.  The truth about a lot of emotional angst and the associated adrenaline and anxiety is that you don’t need them either.  And sometimes the cure doesn’t even hurt that much.