A Vow in the Operating Room: Why I Started Writing

The year 2025 gave me another surprise: I needed to undergo my first operation for appendicitis, which was on the verge of rupturing.

As this was the first surgery of my life, I was terrified. The entire process, from falling ill to the moment of operation, happened in less than 28 hours.

On Wednesday morning, I felt a severe stomach ache. It felt like a cyclone inside my stomach, starting from the center, moving to the right, and finally settling in the bottom right.

A fever and the inability to sleep made it even worse. After some first aid with gastric medicine, I felt slightly better.

When my wife returned home, she suggested I go to a doctor for a medical checkup. dr Frans Liwang suspected appendicitis, but when he performed an "usg intip", the appendix couldn't be clearly seen. However, he strongly predicted it was appendicitis and suggested a CT scan to be certain.

After the CT scan was completed at 11 PM, the radiology team confirmed it was appendicitis. My wife strongly urged me to have surgery immediately to remove it. If we waited too long, it would worsen, and the surgery would escalate from a small procedure to a medium or even large-scale one.

In the morning, my wife packed the necessities needed for a few days at the hospital. We met the surgeon, dr. Suprayadi Chandra, for a checkup before surgery. He read the CT scan reports and suggested doing the surgery as soon as possible. We scheduled it for the same day at 8 PM (following 6 hours of fasting).

During those 6 hours, a journey of life reflection began, as this was my first surgery.

In the past 10 years of my career, I never wrote down my knowledge to share with the public. I only created documents for internal company use—on-demand content to introduce something new to the team. But was that enough?

I had wanted to write articles before, but I never followed through. My inner self whispered that all my knowledge would be lost if the surgery failed, and no one would be able to learn from my experiences. On the flip side, writing articles enhances knowledge; often, when we dive deep to write about a topic, we learn something new about parts we missed in our own experience.

With that realization, I decided that sharing my knowledge is a good deed I can do. To mentally prepare myself, I made a vow (nazar): if the surgery was successful, I would start consistently writing articles every week to share my knowledge and experience, hoping it would be useful to others.

Finally, the surgery and recovery went well. Thanks to the surgeon, my wife, and all the medical staff at the hospital. And so, this is my first article sharing why I started writing. I hope everything continues to go well. Happy New Year 2026 to all my readers.

Momento of surgery: