On Monday, 12/22, after
eating
dinner, I started getting a pain in my stomach (which I thought was
only
indigestion). I didn’t worry about it because it happens very often and
the
pain usually goes away after 15 minutes or so. Well, we still had some
Christmas shopping to finish, so my IL’s came over to watch the kids
and off we
went. At 8:30pm, the pain had not yet
gone away, and it continued to get worse. By 9:30pm, I had terrible
back pain
and was having trouble catching my breath, I was getting very scared
and told
Jason to take me to the ER, just to be safe.
When we arrived, I was
feeling better and felt a
little silly staying if it was only a bad case of indigestion. The
receptionist
asked me if I would like to talk to a nurse before I decided to go
home, so I
did. While we were in the waiting area
to be seen, the pain came back. They called me back into the ER around
10:30pm;
we were there until 3:00am when the results of my blood test came in.
The
doctor said that my white cell count was very high, indicating that I
had an
infection in either my gallbladder or other surrounding organs (that was a BIG
shock).
They wouldn’t know for sure until I could have an abdominal ultra sound
the
next morning, so they admitted me into the hospital at 5:30am.
At 8:15am, on Tuesday
12/23, I had the u/s,
which confirmed that I had many gallstones in my gallbladder and the
biliary
tract. At 2:00pm, they did a procedure called an ERCP; this was to
remove the
stones that traveled into and were stuck in the common bile duct, and
were
unable to be removed by laparoscopic surgery. After the procedure, I
developed
a complication they forewarned me about, Pancreatitis (inflamation of the
pancreas). My white cell count was at 1800 (a normal count is under
300), so I
had to wait until my white cell count was normal for them to remove my
gallbladder. I waited for 3 days for my cell count to be back to normal, and on Friday morning, 12/26, they told me my cell count was
fine
and that I could have my gallbladder removed on Saturday morning. Well as it turns out, on
Friday
night, a nurse came in and told me they had an opening in the operating
room
and they were going to do the surgery that night. At 8:30pm they took
me down
to OR, I was out of surgery and back into my room by 11:45pm.
For the next 2 days I felt like I was at deaths
door, I was in a lot of pain (from the CO2 they used to expand my
abdomen for
the surgery). I had shortness of breath and was very week, mostly
because I
hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since Mon night. I also lost 10
lbs.
(definitely not the way I wanted to lose weight). On Monday, 12/29, I
had my
first light breakfast, and since I was feeling better and my blood tests
were
normal, I was discharged from the hospital. Every day since then, I’ve
been
getting my strength back and feeling healthier, I’m so glad that it’s all over! Since I was in the
hospital over Christmas, we
decided to postpone it until I returned home. On New Years, the kids
finally
got to have the Christmas they SO deserved, we all had a wonderful time!