My Hospital Days With Jupiter, Pete, and Bob

Dear Readers,

On the afternoon of Wednesday May 27th, I had just been rolled into the operating room of our regional hospital to have an emergency appendectomy. The pain in my abdomen had started on Monday evening, but I’d assumed I simply had a stomach ache until sometime on Tuesday, when it had started to dawn on me that I’d never had a stomach ache that didn’t go away within a few hours.

I researched appendicitis and discovered that there are supposed to be two fail-safe tests to determine whether or not you have it – the jump test and the cough test. I passed them both, at home, and since I had, at the time, never spent a night in a hospital or had an operation, I was happy I had.

Nonetheless, at 7:30 Tuesday evening, Steven and I set out for the emergency room, after a malfunctioning thermometer registered my temperature as 101.5. At the ER, all my vitals, including my temperature, were normal, and I was suddenly and inexplicably in no pain at all.

The suggestion was made that perhaps I should have an ultrasound or a CAT scan, but I declined, and Steven and I drove home, feeling very relieved. I wouldn’t have minded having an ultrasound, but as a dyed-in-the-wool claustrophobe, I had long been afraid of having a CAT scan.

However, at 1:30 Wednesday morning, I woke Steven up and told him I thought we should drive back to the emergency room. By the time we got there, I knew something was very wrong. I feared I had pancreatitis, which I’d now researched, and which seemed to be a lot more serious than I’d ever understood. I was in an examining room about two hours later when my appendix suddenly and definitively ruptured.

At the time, neither I nor anyone else knew that was what had happened, because no one knew I had appendicitis. I had just had an ultrasound, but the ER intake doctor had directed that it be of my upper abdomen, and not include the lower right quadrant. I now understand that this may have been in part because appendicitis tends to be a young person’s problem. I could well have been the only person my age who had ever been admitted to this hospital with this particular condition.

Nonetheless, I had been astonished when the intake doctor had omitted the lower right quadrant from the ultrasound, and when my appendix ruptured shortly afterwards, the pain was so intense that I started yelling at the top of my lungs. Ow, Ow Ow. The sound rang through the emergency room.

Even so, I had to beg to get the doctor to come back, and when he appeared, he told me he thought I might have kidney stones. But he also somehow convinced me I needed a CAT scan. I had one, and the results showed what the intake doctor interpreted as an inflamed appendix. He scheduled me for surgery in the late afternoon or early evening, with a surgeon who had only been practicing for two years.

Things changed quickly when the head of the general surgery team looked at the CAT scan himself. He saw at once that my appendix had ruptured, and he took over the surgery, and moved it forward to early afternoon. I understood only later the reasons for the change of plan, but after I was home again, I looked up the surgeon’s record.

I found he’d been doing surgery for twenty-seven years by the time he operated on me, and that his honors and awards included the Bronze Star and a Combat Medical Badge. In the aftermath of 9/11, he’d accepted a commission in the U.S. Army Medical Reserve during his surgical residency. He’d been deployed overseas twice, serving with the 947th Forward Surgical Team. He’d been honorably discharged from military service in 2005 with the rank of Major.

Now, that is the kind of doctor you can bless God for having on call in the hospital when you have a life-threatening emergency.

But although I’ll always be much-more-than-merely grateful for the surgeon’s expertise and his authoritative leadership of his team, it was the other doctor in the operating room that day whose bedside manner I will remember most vividly. He was my anesthesiologist, and from the moment I met him I was impressed by his warmth and humanness – and by his towering height.

As it turned out, he’d played basketball in college, and was an astonishing 6 feet 9 inches tall. When I told him in the lead-up to our joint entry to the operating room that I appreciated his kindness, he leaned down from his towering height to pat me gently on the head – which by that time was swathed in a bizarre elasticized head covering.

He also agreed at once to respect my wishes not to have him administer the drug that would have made me forget the lead-in to the surgery after it was over. I’m very glad that I managed to be clear about this wish, because if I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have been able to remember what happened in the operating room.

Here, then is what happened: as I was trying to convince my body to lie flat on the amazingly hard surgical table – even though I hadn’t lain flat even on a bed since I contracted a vestibular disorder twenty years ago – the anesthesiologist suddenly kneeled next to me and, with his head about ten inches from my head, asked me what I did with my time when I wasn’t about to be operated on.

As alarming things began to happen around me, I found myself telling him that I was a writer, and that my husband and I had just co-written a series of mysteries for young people. I said that my father had created the series – The Three Investigators – at which the anesthesiologist stopped dead, stared at me in amazement, and said “You mean Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw, and the other guy - what was his name?”

“Bob Andrews,” I said.

“The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot,” he said. “I loved those books. They were fantastic. You mean you’re the daughter of the man who wrote them? I can’t believe it! Hey, guys,” he continued, now speaking to the Bronze-Medal-recipient surgeon and the rest of the surgical team, “listen to this! Elizabeth is the daughter of the guy who created the Three Investigators! They were so great. There were three of them. Jupiter Jones was a genius, and he and the others had a secret headquarters!”

As far as I can recall, although no one else responded verbally to the anesthesiologist’s comments, they all listened to him pacifically while I kept trying to express my own astonishment. The last thing I remember before falling into whatever place you fall when an anesthetic works was hearing the anesthesiologist marvel, once again, “Jupiter Jones!”

Although the surgery went well, my recovery has been a slow and miserable business. For a while, I was able to get up every day to work a little at my desk, but about four weeks ago I developed wrist tendonitis from trying to work in bed, and since then I have been struggling to find ways to stop losing weight in the aftermath of having had to take a course of antibiotics that pretty much destroyed my microbiome.

As of today, my wrists have finally recovered enough so that I can write something short, but as it turns out, the so-called “gut-brain axis” is a real thing, and the gut rules it. I now understand that it may take longer than three months for both my gut and my brain to fully recover from the scorched-earth antibiotic, metronidazole.

For that reason, the unexpected surgery seems, at this point, to have stolen not just my whole summer, but a yet-unknown part of the coming autumn, and I consider it fortunate that sometime last spring, as I looked ahead at the possibility of a Jupiter Jones-free life, I suggested to Steven that we try our hands at a new Three Investigators series - one that would take place during the boys’ third year in college.

My idea was that we should have Lord Blackwood (the brother of Septimus Halfpenny’s girlfriend, Winifred Blackwood) get interested in The Three Investigators and decide to fund a private Fellowship in Deductive Inquiry at Merton College, Oxford. My further idea was that we should write twelve new mysteries – one for every month of The Three Investigators’ junior college year abroad – and that each mystery should be set in a different British landscape - Oxford, the Scottish Highlands, the Cotswolds, Cornwall, Dartmoor, etc.

The first two books were already in various stages of completion when Steven’s and my lives were sideswiped, and I’ve now gotten the third one basically plotted, so I’m hoping that the new series will actually come to something as soon as I can put this highly unpleasant health-related interlude behind me.

The only good thing that seems to have come of it so far (other than my life being saved by a confident and highly experienced surgeon!) is that my operating room encounter with the anesthesiologist reminded me once again – and in an almost mystical way – how important the original Three Investigators books were to at least three generations of young people possessed of hungry minds and open hearts. They were a remarkable set of young readers, and they are now a remarkable set of adults.

Warmly,

Elizabeth Arthur

P.S. If some of you have stories of your own about meeting fellow Three Investigators fans in unexpected places, please consider sharing them below. I’d love to read them.