A Productive ER Visit

John took me to the ER in Dallas last night for (hopefully) the last time for this excruciating pain that I have been having. What we knew:

1) the pain was caused by my gall bladder,

2) my gall bladder was not functioning properly,

3) my gall bladder needed to come out.

However, getting someone to take it out in a timely fashion seemed to be an issue. I scheduled an appointment with a surgeon for a 'consult', then I was told it would be another week or two until he could take it out. Seriously? I had to deal with this pain and only eat egg whites and mixed vegetables for another week or two? I asked the schedule girl what am I supposed to do if I get this incredible pain again and she said, "then go to the ER". Hmmm. Now there is an idea.

John took this morsel and ran with it. He called his brother (who works at the hospital that we went to) and lined up the surgeon, the anesthesiologist, everything. It could not have been any easier. We ran our errands, attended a birthday party and did what we needed to do. Mary had Luke, Mother came over to take care of Cooper and Natalie and we were off to the hospital. We were already in the computer system and within 3 hours of getting there, we were in a room awaiting surgery.

What I had done was a laproscopic removal of my gall bladder. Usually they go through your belly button and then make 3 other 'holes' to move everything around. Since I had my hernia surgery, they were unable to go through my belly button, so they had to make 4 random 'portals' in my belly. All I can say is I will not be sporting a 2 piece bathing suit anytime soon. I look like a multiple GSW victim. Yep, looks like I took 4 shots to the gut and walked away from it! Plus they used dermabond to seal it up, so it looks like I have an overdoes of neosporin suffocating my wounds. As long as they heal up decent looking, I'll be all right. Just one gall bladder less.

The surgeon said that every surgery has something that makes it difficult. For mine, would you like to know what the difficulty was? Not enough fat. He said when they put all the air in there, there was not a lot of room to move the instruments around. (Well, at one point in time there was an 9 1/2 pound baby moving around in there!) He said that usually they have fat surrounding the organs, so they can just slice through the fat and out come the organs. Not in my case. He said when they looked at my organs, that they looked like a textbook. All the organs sitting there, without any fat surrounding them, thus making it hard to separate them and get the gall bladder out. Oh well, it can never be too easy, huh?