The Back Story. Chapter 9

The Last Hurrah.

I had gone to Chapel Hill to take a real estate class and to see Lisa. Friday night we had a big rich, albeit vegetarian meal, pesto lasagna, mesclun salad with goat cheese and balsamic vinaigrette, garlic bread, and the oh so decadent, chocolate hazelnut soup for dessert. We washed it all down with a couple of nice bottles of red wine and just had a superbly fun night.

The next day at the lunch break between the two sessions of class, my youngest daughter and her then boyfriend came and had lunch with me. It was fun and all seemed right with the world.

About an hour after lunch, I started having stomach pains. At first I just thought it was really bad gas. As the day progressed the pain grew more intense. Food poisoning? All I knew is that I wasn’t feeling great and it was getting worse. Much worse as it turned out.

By mid afternoon, I knew something was really wrong and I left the class and drove to a nearby Doc in the Box. By the time, I got there, the pain was so intense I could barely walk and I was bouncing off the examination table, my body was shaking so hard. My blood pressure was through the roof but the EKG was normal. X-Ray also showed no abnormality. They gave me some sort of digestive cocktail to ease the pain and it helped. The best guess, at the time,  was that it was some sort of spasm of my esophagus. I felt better. Not great but good enough to leave and go to Lisa’s house.

Probably should have gone to the ER instead which is ultimately where I ended up. The real diagnosis was a gall stone attack that triggered acute pancreatitis. How many ways can you say ouch?

So here’s the deal on your gallbladder because I know you’re just dying to know. The gall bladder is the main producer of bile, which your body uses to digest food. It gets used to the amount you normally need and makes and stores it in readiness for when it’s actually needed. Now, when you change your eating habits, cut down on your food etc, which I had done, the gall bladder doesn’t have to send out as much bile and the no longer needed reserves start to calcify. THEN, you go to Chapel Hill, have a huge rich meal and need all that stored up bile, your gallbladder hops to it, unfortunately all that calcified bile is now like B’B’s that your gallbladder is shooting at your pancreas.

The Pancreas, as any medical professional, is an unreasonable bitch. Once you make her mad, she responds to no amount of cajoling to calm back down and she really, really hates having B’B’s fired at her. So, my pancreas went into a full blown snit when one of these little gallstone B'B's had the unmitigated nerve to invade her space on it’s way to my intestines. It was, in modern parlance, a hot mess.

I spent the night morphined into a coma in the hospital. Have I ever mentioned how much I love morphine? No? Well, I digress but let me just say that in the world of pain meds, Morphine rules. Brian came up the next morning and helped gather me up and take me home.

I made an appointment with a GI surgeon here in Charlotte as everyone told me that since my gallbladder and pancreas were no longer on speaking terms, the gall bladder needed to go. My poor little gall bladder! It seemed like a pretty harsh punishment for one little mistake and I really didn’t want to go through with the whole ordeal.

If you know anything about me at this point, its that I hate doctoring. Am scared to death of doctoring and will at all cost, avoid doctoring, unless I think I’m dying. I felt so good after the stone went away that I couldn’t possibly believe that I REALLY needed to have surgery. I all but talked myself out of this surgery and then one day I had this uncomfortable fluttering feeling between my shoulder blades. A fluttering feeling that I had learned was how it feels when a gallstone moves around in your gall bladder getting into the firing position. I wasn’t about to go through THAT again so the surgery was on.

The surgery to remove one's gall bladder is the most commonly performed surgery in America and according to just about everything I read about it, it is caused by our overwhelmingly rich fattening diet, but what the hell, why change your diet when they can just cut out the offending piece, right?  Its not super complicated.  They poke a few holes in your abdomen, pump you full of air, go through your belly button, detach the gall bladder from your liver then suck that puppy right on out.  The scarring isn't bad at all.  If you didn't know better, you would look at my scars and merely think I'd lost a battle with a rose bush. 

So I had the surgery.  Recovered nicely, and truth be told, am glad I don't have to worry about it anymore.  The liver picks up the slack on bile production so all is right back to normal in my digestive track.  Yeah team!