Tuesday, March 24, 2009

My Trip to North Carolina . . .

. . . didn't happen.

Instead, I elected to spend the better part of the weekend at LDS Hospital having emergency gall bladder surgery.

It's always good to get these things out of the way.

Thursday afternoon (3/19), after eating part of a burger from Red Robin (DON'T go there), it seemed like my stomach started to swell. And swell. And swell. I couldn't burp, couldn't vomit. Only intense pain just under my ribcage in the center of my body. Going home and lying down didn't help. I called my nursing student daughter, and she started for home immediately. The paramedics, when they came, said I wasn't having a heart attack (yeah, right) but recommended going and getting it checked out. By then Cat was there, so she took me to LDS. Lying on my left side helped a teensy little. The ER gave me pain meds whenever I asked for it, and I asked for it pretty frequently, but it did no good at all. HH and Small Son came and gave me a blessing and I was able to bear the pain.

Two ultrasounds later, I was told I had one (or more) stones in my gall bladder, and since it was causing me so much pain, I had better have it out. I signed the papers.

Upstairs in the real part of the hospital, they gave me morphine. Finally the pain thundered down to hole-in-you-stomach level. Since I had been up since 3 am, I dozed a lot. Cat called my friend Cat in North Carolina and advised her of the situation. NC Cat said, "If you didn't want to come, all you had to do was say so. You didn't have to fake a gall bladder attack." Heh heh.

No food or liquids until part of you is gone, dearie, those nice hospital people said. Not eating was OK, because I was afraid the pain would start again, but not having water was really hard, particularly since every four hours when they gave me more morphine, my mouth got cotton dry. However, I knuckled down, and finally they came to take me away. I called Small Son one time more to tell him I loved him (he was just home from school), and I had them tape the good luck charm he had given me to my palm so I wouldn't drop it during surgery. They laughed, but they did it.

I saw about 5 seconds of the operating room. It looked like the inside of Dr. Who's Tardis. I blinked my eyes and was suddenly in the recovery room and people were trying to get me to wake up. I had four holes in my abdomen, nowhere near close to where the gall bladder originally was. It was inflamed and in much worse condition than they had originally thought.

I've spent the rest of the time until now healing and resting. The Relief Society has been bringing us dinners. The pain is gradually going away.

That is how I spent my weekend in North Carolina.

1 comment:

Granpiper said...

Hope you recover quickly. We miss you at band practice.