The Bloggess is having gallstone attacks, so she’s writing about it, as she does. Her post reminds me of my own gallbladder story, which oddly is not about my own gallbladder. (In fact, it’s barely about anyone’s gallbladder.) Which is what I do. Read other people’s posts and think, “Hey, that reminds me of a story!” Although I think that’s about 2/3 of what blogging is.
First things first: Get well soon, Jenny!
So during my senior year in college, I went to a wedding. My favorite cousin (he must be, because he tells me he is) was marrying his awesome girlfriend (she is awesome; I could see that the first time I met her, and my cousin didn’t need to tell me). They had one of the most fun weddings I’ve been to–and I’ve been to a lot of weddings–and at the reception there was shrimp. Piles and piles of shrimp. So, you know, I ate a lot of it.
The next morning, I made a lot of calls to my parents. A lot, because they weren’t home. So of course I, being just barely 21, had to leave obnoxious messages like, “What? You’re not sitting around waiting for me to call?”
Turns out they were on the way home from the ER, where my mother had been diagnosed with gallstones. She was doing better, and surgery was going to be scheduled for a few weeks out.
About two hours later, I went to the ER myself. Not for my gallbladder, but for my appendix. It took them all day to decide, but at some point they decided to admit me, and I had surgery the next morning.
This was before the days of laparoscopy, so I got to spend four days in the hospital. Four days which cost more than four years of college. Good times.
The day after my surgery, the doctor came by my room as I was making my way to the bathroom, and we had this exchange:
Doctor: [sternly] Are you walking?
Me: Just to the bathroom and back.
Doctor: [still really stern] I want you to walk.
Me: Okay.
Doctor: [sticking with the stern thing, because apparently it works for him] I mean it. I want you to walk.
Me: Okay.
So I started to walk. He didn’t say how much to walk, but I figured that it would be further and more often than I wanted to. I decided that getting up every two hours and walking as much as I could would probably be close enough. I walked until I was halfway to tired, and then turned around and went back. Every time, I went farther (further? I never get those straight. But one of the uses in this paragraph has to be correct. I’m covering my bases.)
After a day, one of the nurses said, a little tentatively, “Are you sure you’re supposed to be walking so much?”
I said, “I don’t know. The doctor said to walk, but he didn’t say how much. Is it too much?”
She shrugged and said, “Well, I’ve never seen anyone recover from open abdominal surgery this quickly, so I guess keep doing it.”
Mind you, all of this was at the end of the academic quarter. Which meant that the next week, I had final exams. Thanks to the roommate who got me to the ER and stayed there all day until I was admitted, and then came back the day of my surgery and stayed there until I was awake, I got two of the four postponed.
It was also right before my sorority formal, which I totally went to. Take that, open abdominal surgery.
Impressive recovery! Did the eating piles of shrimp have anything to do with the appendicitis? I just want to know because I have a tendancy to eat piles of shrimp…
I believe not, although I very much wanted to be able to blame the whole thing on my cousin. I see now that I left out that part of the story. The shrimp thing doesn’t make a lot of sense on its own. Possibly it still doesn’t. You have to know me and my cousin. Or have me properly explain it.
I’ve always wanted to say “In your face!” to a surgical procedure. But I would totally have been the wuss to ask: so how much EXACTLY do you want me to walk?
I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t ask that. I think I was just taken aback by how emphatic he was about the very topic.
Oh geez! You were almost roomies with your mom at the hospital. My dad had to get his appendix out a few weeks before I had baby grouch. ironically we WERE at the hospital at the same time – since I had to get in for additional monitoring after a troubling looking non-stress test. My poor mother.
Not for the appendix–we were in different states at that point–but it could have happened two weeks later when I was home and in the hospital for scheduled arthroscopy (I have another post about that somewhere. Maybe I can do some time-traveling links, since I wrote about them in reverse order.)
Oh! Sorry I missed the part about different states. :/ I guess you could have possibly skyped in your matching gowns then.