From The Guys at Animoto

That’s the question that rang through my head as I woke up in massive pain on Thursday morning. I felt like what 50 Cent must have felt like when he was shot eight times in the stomach (or was that nine?). In short, I was pretty convinced I was going to die.

To celebrate several big recent technical achievements (which you should be hearing about over the new few months), we had taken the whole office out the night before to do some drinking and karaokeing. We got a private room at Second On Second, a cool joint in the East Village. Songs we screamed our hearts out to included “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana, “Enter Sandman” by Metallica, “Renegade” by Styx, and “Rollercoaster” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We rocked out hard. Really hard. Our tab, which rivaled one of our monthly Amazon AWS bills, was evidence.

Thursday morning’s excruciating pains made me wonder if I had just drank too much. But I’m all too familiar with that pain, and this was clearly different. This wasn’t a stomach pain. This was a brutal pain in my right side. It felt as if Barry Bonds had nailed me with a baseball bat in my gut. (And post-’roids at that).

I did a quick check on Wikipedia to lookup the location of my major organs. Liver… clear. Pancreas… safe. Spleen, gallbladder, oesophagus… all good. Appendix… hmm… crap. The pain was right where my appendix is. Great, maybe my appendix was about to burst.

Some friends were telling me I should go visit the emergency room and get checked out. Despite their better judgements, I decided not to waste a precious day’s work and sit around waiting forever for a doctor. Plus, I was in too much pain to get up from my chair let alone trek across the city. If I died, well… lesson learned for my next life.

It’s been five days now and I’m happy to report I’m still alive. I can almost walk upright, and I can make it up and down stairs without too much agony-wincing. I can also sneeze without shrieking loudly in pain… which apparently I’ve taken for granted all these years.

After some more research, I’ve concluded the injury I incurred was a “severe abdominal sprain.” It makes sense now: the drunken moshing, the jumping off couches, and the back-arching-rockstar-microphone-screaming had caused me to literally rip & tear the muscles in my stomach.

Pretty pathetic. I’m sure that never happened to Axl Rose.

Our lawyers are now advising us to include “Karaoke Debauchery” as one of the company’s major risks in our investor materials. So be it. But as long as nobody breaks their keyboard coding fingers… rest assured, the party will go on and Nirvana will never be let down.

And neither will Axl.

~ by jason on April 14th, 2008.