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Update.

Emergency appendectomy went well.  Laparoscopy -- easy breezy.  He has about an hour in recovery before they move him to his room for the night.  Should be coming home tomorrow if there's no fever, and he's looking at roughly two weeks off of work.  Lucky sonofabitch.  (No offense, mom.)

Meanwhile, we're huddled in the waiting room watching Iowa dominate in the Orange Bowl.  (I know, I know.  The Hawks in a bowl game is about the only time you'll catch me watching sports.) 

We're supposed to fly back east on Thursday morning, but we're looking at a snowstorm Wednesday night, so I'm not holding my breath.

Should have known something was up.  Getting here was entirely too easy.

In which we rush to the emergency room.

Because no vacation is complete without a trip to the hospital, we're in the waiting room in the surgical wing of Mercy Medical Center in Cedar Rapids.  My brother -- pain in the ass that he is -- decided to let his appendix get infected, so here we are.

This morning, the Girl and I took mom to Mount Vernon for lunch at the Lincoln Cafe. (I had tomato sage soup and a roasted lake trout sandwich with kimchee mustard. Amazing.) We dropped by campus to see a friend in the alumni office (which also gave me the convenient opportunity to point out my name on the wall), then headed back to Cedar Rapids for groceries.  It's Armenian Christmas today -- Epiphany -- and we'd planned to have a nice dinner at the house before the Iowa game.  Until my brother's useless little organ turned mutinous, that is.

I was at Target when I called him to let him know we'd be home in time to pick up the girls from school.  He sounded like hell -- was laying down on the couch with severe stomach pain.  He wasn't keen on us coming back to take him to the hospital, and said he'd wait it out a bit to see if it was something more or less benign.  Well, turns out it wasn't.

On the way home we called my aunt and recruited her to badger him into going to the emergency room, so by the time we got there he was more or less resigned to that course of action.  Piled him into the van and blazed a trail to the Marengo hospital, where they confirmed what we all suspected: appendicitis. Because I'm feeling sorry for him, I'll gloss over the part where they poked him with a needle and gave him some pain meds -- and he wailed like a stuck pig a process that very clearly did not agree with him.

Of course, there was no surgeon at the Marengo hospital, so they put him in an ambulance and hauled ass to Cedar Rapids. He's in pre-op right now, waiting for surgery and not particularly happy about it.  We share a hatred for hospitals, but he's doing fine -- just very uncomfortable.

The real tragedy here is that we'll be eating cafeteria food instead of his freshly caught fish. Thanks, big brother!