"Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres . . . " — Caesar
A week ago, at about four o'clock in the afternoon, my stomach hurt. The sensation was very precise: a single point, directly under my sternum. I had been out to lunch with my son, so I cleverly deduced the cause. Obviously I had a hard bit of potato "waffle fry" lodged in the bottom of my esophagus.
I drank some milk, I ate some bread, all with the aim of pushing the irritating foodstuff past the valve into my stomach. But nothing worked, and the pain got worse. Really worse. Clammy sweating worse.
Just to make things more complicated, my talented wife wasn't home, nor was she expected home for two or three days. So I left my responsible youngest child in charge of the house and the dog, got in my car, and drove up to Franklin Medical Center for a stop in the Emergency Room.
They didn't waste any time. When a middle-aged man shows up experiencing severe pain anywhere in the torso, and doesn't have an obvious gunshot wound, the default assumption is "heart attack." They gave me nitroglycerine tablets to dissolve under my tongue, they gave me major-league painkillers, and — in response to my babble about waffle fries — they gave me some liquid Mylanta laced with lidocaine. Other than the painkillers, nothing helped.
So they did one of the two things which separate modern medicine from the desperate gropings of the era before 1900: they looked inside me. Until Roentgen, the only way to tell what was going on inside a sick person was to open him up (and before the use of anaesthetics and antiseptics, that was considerably more risky than doing nothing). And before the development of CAT scans in the 1970s, even X-ray images took hours to develop.
But on Friday, in a rural hospital in western Massachusetts, they x-rayed my chest (no sign of heart attack), CAT-scanned most of my torso, and even did an ultrasound of my squishy bits.
Bingo. There was a stone about the size of a peanut lodged in the duct leading out of my gall bladder. As is traditional when an organ gets obstructed, it was infected and inflamed. No waffle fries in sight.
After that was rather an anticlimax. Sometime during the night the stone must have shifted, because by the time I was admitted to a room for an overnight stay, the pain began to ease. I never got to try the morphine they were going to give me.
Saturday was a nightmare, but only for the part of me above the neck. I hadn't brought a book or a notepad, I was a little too stressed to make stuff up, and I can't stand watching television. So I cycled among sleep, boredom, and getting poked with things. By invoking the tragedy of a 15-year-old left home alone with nobody to look after him I managed to wheedle my way into release Saturday evening, and drove home.
I spent Sunday at home drinking clear liquids until my talented wife arrived, and on Monday morning at the start of the business day did battle with the automated telephone menu system at my primary doctor's office. Eventually I decided it would be simpler to get in the car and drive there in order to explain to a human what had happened so that my insurance company wouldn't punish me for Not Following Procedures while sick.
I also phoned the office of the confidence-inspiring doctor who had diagnosed me at Franklin Medical Center, and we set up an appointment to get rid of the problem for good and all. I was hoping he might be able to just remove the stone itself, but apparently standard procedure is to take out the whole gall bladder. It's one of those organs that you can kinda get by without — invertebrates don't have them at all.
The past week I spent carefully following a low-fat diet and swallowing the biggest damned antibiotic pills I've ever seen. Seriously: large-animal veterinarians would look at these and say "Isn't that a little much?" My urine (not to get indelicate) looked and smelled like something coming out of a Soviet oil refinery's waste stream.
This morning, my talented wife drove me back up to Franklin Medical Center's spiffy new Surgical Wing, where I was deprived of my clothing, the hair on my abdomen, my glasses, and, ultimately, consciousness. When I woke up there were four little holes in my tummy: one at the navel, one more or less over my stomach, and two close together on the right-hand side just under the bottom of my rib cage. My troublesome gall bladder was nowhere to be seen.
The surgical technique is called laparascopy, and involves the use of a tiny camera to enable the surgeon to see what he's doing, and special low-profile instruments to poke in through the little holes and grab the gall bladder. They drain out the bile and then just remove the sad little empty balloon, then stitch up. My bandages are literally large-size Band-Aids(tm).
And with that, they kicked me out. No wheedling required. I'm home, and unless I manage to do myself an injury or get a galloping infection, that's all. I'm not even confined to my bed: the doctor even said the more activity the better (with the unspoken caveat that I should hold off on the luge racing and illegal bare-knuckle boxing for a while).
Sadly I did not get to take my stone(s) home with me. There are apparently some tiresome regulations about proper disposal of biomedical waste, so I won't be able to wear it on my watch-chain.
Until my innards adjust, I still have to follow a low-fat diet, and I have painkillers in case I need them. I did have to bail out of one writing-workshop meeting this weekend because my talented wife refuses to drive me to it. I think she's being over-protective. They're just little holes. She went down into a cave in France after passing a kidney stone.
Hope you are ok and pain free as well as gall bladder free.
Posted by: [email protected] | 05/01/2018 at 04:30 PM
You were lucky. :-)
Glad it was that easy. I won't go into my gall bladder extraction. :-)
Posted by: Mage | 05/16/2018 at 04:22 PM