My stinking gallbladder
Monday, Nov. 03, 2008 11:26 AM

"I have a simple philosophy: Fill what's empty. Empty what's full. Scratch where it itches." - Alice Roosevelt Longworth

Oh my god, it's been forever since I updated!!!!! I'm usually not like this. But at least this time I actually have something to say.

Turns out my gallbladder was messed up. Kent kept telling me my face would go pale and then have color and then go pale again. My stomach hurt off and on, but everybody kept telling me it was probably constipation. It didn't feel like constipation. So I finally went to the doctor and they had me go take a sonogram. Well, that didn't turn anything up so they had me go to the hospital for a hydroscan.. hydrascan... however you spell it.... and it turns out my gallbladder had stopped functioning. Say what? I was only 30 years old. How could my gallbladder stop functioning? That's an old man's disease or something, right? But nope. My gallbladder had given out.

So they set up an appointment for me to have it taken out. That was on the 18th of October, the day before my 31st birthday. Let's just say that this year I didn't have a birthday. That's okay with me, though. The older I get, the more I find I want less or need less. But to get back to the story, I went in for surgery on Saturday and bloated up like a fat cow on Christmas. I guess it's because they pump air into your body when they do the operation. Now I'm swollen and can't wear anything but sweatpants for a month. That's how long it'll take for the swelling to go down. They removed the gallbladder successfully, and found over 50 gallstones in it. Small ones, that is. Not huge ones. They also said that if I didn't have the surgery when I had it, my gallbladder would have burst on me.

But this isn't the end of my October. Get this... Three days after surgery I had a painful attack. I was in so much pain I thought I was dying. They had told me to walk around to get rid of the air and gas inside my body from the operation, so I did that. And the entire time I kept feeling this pressure in my upper chest that made it hard to breathe and stuff... so I just assumed it was because of the operation that I felt this pressure... that it was part of the gas and air. I guess not. I was in so much pain that I almost fainted. I lost control of my bowels (as sick as that is), and my body started to sweat. I had sweat pouring down my forehead all over me.

Kent ended up calling the emergency room and thus began my 5 nights and four days in the hospital. It turns out one of the gallstones had gotten lodged in the tube that leads from the liver and pancreas into the small intestine.. which caused the bile being created from the food to push back up the tube and out the hole where the gallbladder used to be. I had a lot of bile floating around my body, which the doctor compared to pouring dishwashing liquid inside of you. They had to starve me for the four days I was in there to stop bile from being produced, and to hopefully allow the hole to heal on it's own - which it did, thankfully.

If it hadn't healed, I would have had to have had another operation where they go in through your mouth and put a stint inside the tube. About two weeks after putting it in, they would have to go back in and pull the stint out. If that didn't work, they would have had to operate on me again. I'm just glad it worked because it was pure hell. It really was. I'm still badly bruised from all the blood they took from me and the IV I had stuck in my arm. I don't know how terminally ill patients do it. I was going nuts by the 4th day just wanting to get home to my own bed. The first three days I was so drugged up it didn't matter, but those beds are not the best beds in the world and they completely suck. On top of that, I had another painful attack on Thursday night that I think scared my parents half to death.. but I told them the next day that it wasn't half as bad as the one that landed me in the hospital.

Now I'm at home. I'm swollen but it's going down. I can almost fit into my jeans again. I drove for the first time today in days and I can feel it in my stomach muscles right now. I can't wait to heal completely. I'm so tired of being sick. My digestive system has to get back to normal.. I can't drink carbonated drinks or eat salads right now. I can't have spicy things or eat a lot of greasy foods. It's a diet in it's own making. And I can't walk up and down a flight of stairs very well since they had to cut through my diaphragm to get to my gallbladder...

So anyway.. Halloween night was okay. JR ended up trick-or-treating with my nieces and nephew, and Kent and I handed out candy at Angie and Brian's house. There's quite a bit more I want to talk about but I'll save that for another entry since I think I wrote a bunch in this one.

Wow. It feels good to be writing again. I've missed it.