Gallbladder Eviction
The spoiler is right up there in the title: I’m having surgery on Tuesday to have my gallbladder removed.
It all started two weekends ago… I had a quiet Saturday evening in after a friend’s afternoon wedding. I picked up a pizza, made a pina colada, and watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part One in anticipation of taking myself to see Part Two the next morning. I went to bed around 11pm.
At about 12:50am, I woke up out of a sound sleep to a really bad pain in my chest. It was pretty much centered on my sternum and stretching across my chest right where my bra band would go. I’d never experienced anything like it before… so of course the first thing I did was call my mom. She must have been sleeping like a rock because she didn’t hear it. So naturally, the next thing I did was post on Facebook. What? Isn’t that the most logical thing to do next?
Anyway, to make a long story short, after about an hour of pacing, and trying to call my mom, and getting about halfway out the door to take myself to the ER and going back to throw up, my uncle saw my Facebook post and offered to take me. We got about halfway there and my mom saw the missed calls and finally called back. So she met me at the ER.
First I got accused of having heartburn, so I got to drink a nice numbing GI cocktail, which of course did nothing whatsoever. Due to the hole in my heart, they also did an EKG. They did some blood work and everything came up looking fine. Then the doctor came in and poked and prodded my abdomen and I about hit the ceiling. Verdict? Hmm… we think it might be your gallbladder. So they got the nice ultrasound technician out of bed in the middle of the night to come in and check out it out. Confirmation, gallstone.
I got a needle in my butt with a pretty decent painkiller and once the pain was down to a manageable level, I was sent home with the instructions to follow up with the surgeon. After that meeting, it was pretty much decided that the gallbladder had to go. With a family history and my own risk factors, pretty much it is going to continue to be a problem in the future. So we’re going to take it out before it can cause more problems.
I’m almost out of time to write at the moment, so I’ll have to address the financial implications in another post. Suffice it to say, I won’t be saving any money to buy rustic dining furniture or the dining room to put it in anytime soon. I’ll be making payments to the surgery center thanks to my craptastic medical “insurance.”
