Catastrophic Surgical Misadventure

Well, we are assuming that it's not that. But I liked the sound of it so much that I wrote it down immediately when my surgeon said it.

Here I am, live blogging from the bed in room #21 of the Emergency Department. You'd think I was developing some sort of crush on the surgeon that yanked my gallbladder out -- given that I tortured myself with steri strips in order to talk to him again, and now camped out in the ED fresh off a consult with him.

Yesterday afternoon my stomach/abdomen started hurting. I am PMSing and had just crammed a quarter of a bag of potato chips down my gullet, so I figured that was the problem. But it kept hurting all evening, which sucked. I took one of my 800mg Ibuprofens and was able to at least get to sleep.

When I woke up, it still hurt but not too badly. I still wasn't going to chance eating anything. By lunchtime, I was starving. To death. So I got a salad, and man was it good. Twenty minutes later, all hell broke loose.

The pain quickly went from "ow, that kinda hurts" to "holyfuckingshitohmygodsweetmamahelpme" accompanied with literally writhing around on the floor (the dirty, nasty carpeted floor of my office), sweating and moaning. It lasted about 10 minutes -- basically an eternity -- and then was gone. Poof! Like nothing ever happened. Except that I was completely soaked in sweat, shaking, panting, and chalk white.

My co-workers had already procured a wheelchair to take me to the ED (perk of working in a hospital), but I tried to tell them that I was okay now. Which I was. Only it didn't last long. A few minutes later, it started all over again. Gawd, it's awful pain.

Fast forward to now. I am lying on a bed, getting Dilaudid in an IV drip. I've just had my 4th cup of apple juice with contrast dye in it as preparation for the CT scan I've got in 20 minutes. Good times.

The good news is that my bloodwork just got back and since my liver enzymes are jacked up, it just about confirms what my surgeon suspected which is a stone in the bile duct. It snuck in there before they got my gallbladder out and has been just hanging around, waiting to torture me.

So I'll get the CT scan in a bit, it will show that nothing else major is wrong, and I'll have an endoscopy tomorrow to remove the stone. I moaned and pissed and whined about needed to go home and see my kids, so they are actually releasing me (pending good CT scan results) with instructions to come back at 9:30 tomorrow morning for the endoscopy.

I am SO over myself and these medical woes. But at least I got another idea for my ficticious band names list: Catastrophic Surgical Misadventure. Rock on! Get it? Rock... stone... in my bile duct... Okay, that's not funny. Give me a break, I'm high on pain meds right now, okay?