A gall bladder attack?

Out, out damned bladder of gall.

Seriously, I ignored mine and wound up with a toe tag.
Really. My gall bladder was obstructed and finally, literally burst. And the digestive juices inside began doing what digestive juices do. Down went Stephen.

So, most of my pancreas is gone, leaving me a permanently insulin-dependent diabetic (type 3C for you medical readers). I take up to 30 pills a day to replace the enzymes from the pancreas. My stomach was ulcerated from the outside which required me to be fed through a duodenal tube for more than a month while it healed. I could identify the J-tubes draining the surgical wound. I was down to 170 pounds (wish I could have kept that). My hair turned white.

When my wife finally went home to rest, she got a phone call from the ICU to come back to visit me as they didn’t think I would survive the day. When she arrived she said I was the Pillsbury Dough Boy. The doctors were adding fluids to keep my blood pressure up (I learned a new term later – 40 over palp), and I had a tracheotomy breathing for me. (She said my balls were the size of grapefruits – I am sure glad that I was unconscious). My wife saw a toe tag clipped to my bedside chart.

In recovery I was on and off the ventilator, had an opening in my belly that a football could pass through. One student nurse was shocked as she exclaimed “My god, I can see is heart beating” through the open wound. (It was the pericardial sac). I was hospitalized from September to January and needed physical therapy to learn to walk again. I went home with a vacuum pump attached to the still-open wound, and daily nursing visits for three more months. The pump was supposed to promote faster healing.

So the toe tag wasn’t needed.
And when the surgeon went back in to clean up the damage, he removed what was left of the gall bladder.

For years afterwards, I kept getting infections in the bile duct that required stents. That meant an ERCP every six months. (I won’t describe the ERCP here, but it is most unpleasant).

And through it all I went partially deaf from the huge load of antibiotics I was given after contracting a pseudomonas infection in the first hospital. (But I did get a private room for the remainder of my hospitalization).

There is a moral to this gruesome story.

If your doctor recommends removing the gall bladder. Do it. Don’t wait. Ironically mine had been scheduled for removal before all this started. The hospital (a different one closer to home) called my wife asking why I didn’t keep my pre-surgery appointment. She finally had something to laugh about.

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