Tony Smokes and the Flared-Up Appendix!

So hey everyone, it’s Dylan. As Owen said yesterday, Tony Smokes and The Ladykillers are officially dropping out of the Maine World Tour,  and there’s a very simple reason: yesterday I went t0 the emergency room for appendicitis and got my appendix removed. The timing couldn’t have been greater; no, really. We were the only band left in the tour that was unaffected by extenuating circumstances, but that all changed at approximately 5pm Sunday night when I started to feel a sharp pain in my lower-right abdomen.

I thought it was severe gas pain, because I had experienced a similar episode a few months ago. The pain lasted throughout the night, and on a scale from 1 to 10, it had reached to 9 for several hours. I had my mother massage my back to see if she could push any gas out, but no luck. I tried sitting under a hit shower for 30 minutes and still no luck. The pain was still there. I was supposed to work at Hannaford at 5am the next day, and since the pain had already lasted 6 hours, I made sure to call my manager and let her know the deal.

I slept fairly well that night, but when I woke up around 8am the next day, the pain was still there, full-blown. My mom drove me to Scarborough Health Care to see what the deal was, and after a general examination and blood test, the doc told me that I had the classic symptoms for appendicitis. GREAT. After paying the bill, my mom and I drove straight to Maine Medical. That’s when I started calling the the Tony Smokes gang and told them today’s practice certainly wasn’t happening and the whole Maine World Tour was thrown into messy state of purgatory once again.

When I arrived to Maine Med, I was put into an emergency room quickly, but it about seven hours until I could actually get a CT scan to determine if I actually had appendicitis (I have Ulcerative Colitis that’s been in remission for two years, so doctors were ruling a complication from that in addition).  Thankfully, I was surrounded by two Asimov books, an iPod, a Nintendo DS, my good ol’ bandmates and my mother for long durations of my stay, so the wait wasn’t too bad. Around 5pm, one of my doctors came in and very bluntly said that it was acute appendicitis. My appendix wasn’t blowing up at the moment, but it was having a very bad flare-up that wasn’t going to hide again.

Throughout this entire day, I maintained a very positive outlook on my entire situation. I laughed it off a lot, especially since it seemed so absurd that another uncontrollable factor was affecting the Maine World Tour in a major way. It was the final blow dealt by Murphy’s Law: Lady Lamb lost TJ, Feel It Robot split up, the lead singer of Tony Smokes got appendicitis the week of the tour. While I was undoubtedly disappointed by the timing of all of this, part of me couldn’t help but laugh at the odd arrangements of life’s incidents. It’s almost as if the Maine World Tour became more memorable by all the shit that screwed it up in a hilariously tragic way.

I went into surgery at about 9pm, and it lasted for an hour and a half. The surgery was successful and as expected, I was pretty damn silly when I woke up from the anesthesia. It had been 30 hours since I last ate or drank some kind of food, so the recovery nurse offered me a cherry Popsicle, and it was possibly the best Popsicle I have ever had. When I was brought to my overnight room, I was surprised with even more goodies: graham crackers, saltine crackers, ginger ale and water. I stayed up until 1:30am watching Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and jamming crackers down my dry throat.

Earlier today, I learned how to walk again, had some french toast and learned that Cash Cab was Maine Medical’s favorite TV show (every doctor and nurse said they loved the show, and it was the only good thing on during the day). At 10am this morning, my mom came to pick me up. I was wheeled out of the building and now I’ve just been hanging out at my house, doing nothing (in relation to my otherwise busy life).

Too bad, so sad that Tony Smokes will no longer be playing the World Tour, but I don’t regret one thing that happened in all of this, because it surely made everyone’s life a lot more interesting. If I recover enough by Saturday night, Tony Smokes and The Ladykillers will be playing the Empire Dine & Dance with Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, Johnny Fountain and the Manes and S-Bot. If you want to be part of the accumulative adventure and drama that happened throughout this entire time of planning and mishaps, I’d love to see you there. It would be a great way to end a grand idea that we’ll surely tackle in the years to come.

–Dylan