Yesterday morning I had a laparoscopic cholecystectomy, in other words a gallbladder removal.
I started having pains a while back, but we couldn't seem to figure out what it was as there wasn't really any pattern to them. Because it kind of felt like really bad heartburn the doctor I saw assumed I just had occasional bad acid reflux and put me on Zantac. We wondered if it might be gallstones (having recently been pregnant is a higher risk factor for this) so I tried a bland diet for a while but that didn't seem to make a difference. Last Tuesday night the pain came back again and lasted about a couple hours so we went into the ER as nothing else was open. They gave me a really nasty lidocane mixture to drink and it seemed like the pain eased. They also ran some blood tests, and since everything seemed fine they sent me home with orders to try a higher dosage of Zantac and to be sure I had it twice a day, every day.
Saturday night I started having pain at 10pm, tried to sleep but it wasn't happening, then it started to get worse so we headed back to the ER at around 1:30am(Karys loved all this getting up in the middle of the night by the way). This time they finally did an x-ray and set me up to have an ultrasound done at 9am. So after giving me some pain killers (and sticking me 5 times trying to get an iv in) they sent us home to get some sleep before coming back for the ultrasound. Lo and behold, the first thing the ultrasound tech said was "and here are all your gallstones". So I went to the recommended doctor/surgeon Monday morning and set things up for Tuesday. Everything went well and I was able to come home at 8pm. So far everything seems to be healing well although I can't pick Karys up yet & I'm still on bland food for a few more days.
A big THANK YOU!!!! to everyone for their help and support. Especially Shauna, Janell, Mary, Ali, Brindy & Niki for their help. We've really appreciated it.
P.S. and thank you to all the wonderful sisters from our new ward who came to help during the second week of recovery even though they hadn't even met me yet!
2 comments:
The same thing happened to me but I had to wait a whole 6 months to get my gall bladder removed I guess there are some downsides to socialized healkth care)!!! Man, was that ever painful - worse than labour. I hope that your recovery goes a lot better than mine.
Glad you got it taken care of. From what you said here and from what Cindy has told me gall stones are no fun.
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