Surgery

It’s been a while since I’ve checked in. As usual this isn’t because nothing has been going on. Actually it’s quite the opposite. I just haven’t been able to slow down enough to give a report.

Emergency Surgery

A year or so ago I was having some recurring abdominal pains so I went to the doctor. She did a CT scan and noticed that I had a few kidney stones and a gall stone. I passed the kidney stones and then the real fun began. I started having gall stone attacks. For the most part they were just an annoyance that made me lose a lot of sleep and consequently vacation days. But after a few months they started getting rather intense. Went to the doctor again and she gave me some drugs for the pain and told me to try to manage it with diet. Well anything with any fat at all could trigger it and after further reading I found out that just laying on your left side could also trigger an attack.

Well the first weekend in July I came home from work a little early because I couldn’t stand sitting in my chair. It was getting painful but I was trying to tough it out. I knew exactly what the problem was and exactly what the solution was. I just didn’t have time for it. I had multiple projects in the works and my house was still substantially less than complete. Plus I didn’t have much of a buffer on vacation days if we were going to be able to go at all.

I tried to make it get better and nothing would work so Victoria called our neighbor over, she’s and EMT, and she persuaded me to go to the ER. After painfully waiting for hours in the ER they finally saw me. They kept asking me to rate my pain on a scale of 1 to 10. I had a hard time with this and kept thinking about the Brian Regan comedy routine. So I told the nurses, “Well a broken femur is supposed to be a 10 and I did that in ’97. This is far worse so how about 35.” An x-ray, EKG, and ultrasound later they admitted me. They gave me some morphine so I could sleep and scheduled me for surgery Saturday morning.

The next morning the doctor came in and explained what was going on. She used the phrase, “If you want to keep on living…” and the word “gangrenous” in the discussion. As if I needed more persuasion, but I was even more convinced after that.

The surgery was laparoscopic so I have 4 little scars that look like bullet holes. The doctor said that my gall bladder had a large stone and showed significant scarring. So it was good that I didn’t wait any longer. I healed up pretty quickly and only missed a few days of work the next week. The next Friday the doctor approved me for driving so our vacation could go on as scheduled. We left pretty much as soon as I got back from her office.

It’s been three weeks since the surgery and three weeks without an attack. That’s the first time in about a year that I can say that. At its worst the attacks were coming about every 5 days. I sure hope those days are all behind me.

I doubt any of them are reading this but I just wanted to give a tremendous thank you to all of the staff at the hospital. Everybody, without exception, was very nice and pleasant. I don’t ever want to have to do something like that again, but if I do I’ll pick the same folks to help me out.