Content Warning: This post is about medical procedures and includes images. Please skip if this would distress you.
TLDR: For those who choose to skip – I had my gallbladder removed on Friday, and I’m recovering.
Story Time
For several weeks, I’ve been experiencing odd pangs in my abdomen and suffering from stomach upset. It would flare up either when I am hungry and haven’t eaten, or shortly after eating.
Now this pain did not feel like acid reflux. So I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. I tried many different tactics to keep it under control: cutting alcohol, cutting caffeine, reducing the amount of food I ate.
Nothing worked.
Then came this past week. The pain became acute – again either before or after eating. In addition, I suffered terrible fatigue and low-grade fevers off and on.
This week was also the week of the most important fundraising event of the year for my workplace, so I was desperately trying to kick whatever illness was making me feel awful.
Thursday night, after dinner, I modelled the three dress options I’d gotten for the workplace gala. I wanted Sunshine to help me pick out which dress would look best. As I finished up the mini fashion show, pain flared up in my chest, wrapping all the way around my back and settled in between my shoulder blades.
Because we’d just eaten dinner (chicken, rice, and peas), I went ahead and took some antacids in hopes that the pain was merely acid reflux. It didn’t help, not even a little bit.
As the pain in my chest increased, my chest felt increasingly as though something wrapped around my chest, making breathing uncomfortable.
With all of those symptoms in place, I was understandably concerned. Even though it was nearly Sunshine’s bedtime, we made the decision to take me to the ER.
Triage pulled me back immediately and ran an EKG to check to see if there was something wrong in my heart. That came out normal. They brought me back to an ER room for additional tests, and they got me started on an IV after pulling blood for said tests.
At this point, I am going to summarize. The attending physician determined my issue was my gallbladder. To confirm it, I had an ultrasound, but not until after I got a nice full dose of Fentanyl.
My poor gallbladder was full of gallstones. It wasn’t infected or inflamed, so they didn’t need to do emergency surgery, but it still needed to go. So on Friday afternoon, I went under and they conducted laparoscopic surgery to extract my organ.
So now I’m at home and still in a lot of pain. I have pain meds and additional meds to counteract the side effects. Needless to say, I didn’t make it to the gala event. I’m just starting to feel better, but the pain still sucks.
The incisions also look really gnarly. Thankfully I have a buffer of posts to keep this going while I recover, but I wanted to get this update out for those who may be interested/curious.
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