Marlot Kuiper

Preface It is 27 December 2018. As I am eager to finish my dissertation, knowing that some courses I have to teach will start soon, I find myself frantically working on its final chapters the day after Christmas. Combining teaching and finishing a PhD thesis is quite a ‘thing’, I must say. I didn’t have such a good night sleep as my stomach was aching, but as I woke up feeling a bit better, I sat myself behind my laptop. Then out of nowhere, a fierce pain runs through my stomach. I didn’t eat that much with Christmas, did I?! As the pain quickly intensifies, I decide to lay down on the couch. It is 6pm. I enter the general practice centre next to St. Sebastian’s hospital 1 . As the pain had become almost unbearable, I had started to throw up, upon which the medical staff invited me to come in immediately when I called in. The GP examines my stomach, and after only a few minutes he says: “I’m going to move you one door further” [St. Sebastian’s emergency department] “I think you have an appendicitis.” After almost five hours of incredible pain, various examinations like blood tests, an ultrasound scan, a CT scan, and a lot of waiting, I enter St. Sebastian’s surgery department around 11.00pm. This time not by walking, but in a hospital bed. I never meant to take ‘participant observation’ this far… When I enter the operating theatre, I immediately recognize the anaesthesiologist and nurse anaesthetist from my fieldwork. As my ethnographic fieldwork has been a while ago, and I look rather different in a patient’s suit with a pale face, I quickly tell them who I am and about the research I’ve been conducting. Immediately they joke that they “have to do the checklist very thorough then!” And that’s what they do. The whole team gathers around the surgical table, with the anaesthesiologist holding the checklist in his hands. They cover all items one by one, and immediately tick them off on the piece of paper. From there, I only remember that I tried to count until ten. About two hours later, I wake up. Without appendix. I remember the first feeling was ‘relief’ as the unbearable pain was gone. Yet, this pain was replaced by pain caused by the surgery, and recovery would take time. 1 All names in this dissertation are fictive. For more information about the research sites and their fictive names, see chapter 4