Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Gallbladder update

In reading over my last few posts it appears I forgot to mention something.

When I went to the neurosurgeon, he said "BTW, did anyone tell you you have a gallstone?" A what? I have a what where? No doc...no one bothered to tell me this. "Oh. Well, you have a 1.7cm gallstone." How big? Well, about the size of a dime. Apparently my frickin' body has decided it would be nice to grow a pearl in my gallbladder. This explains a lot of what's been going on with my gastrointestinal system in the past few months, although I didn't think anything was bothering me other than a finicky system.

The other night I had a REALLY REALLY bad attack. Bad enough that Aaron threatened to take me to the ER. Luckily for me, these attacks pass fairly quickly - 15 to 30 minutes, although I do hurt for about 16 hours or so all told, just not bad. I went to the college doc yesterday. He ran some b/w (I should get the results today or tomorrow) and I go in for a u/s on Thursday morning. Since the gallstone was an incidental find (they weren't looking for it, it just happened to show up on the MRI), he wants to find out what's REALLY going on. Do I have more than one? How are they (it?) positioned? How likely am I to have a blockage? Will I need surgery?

I found out from my sister that they can do my endo lap AND my gallbladder surgery at the same time. It will be cheaper that way, and a lot easier on me if I only have to recover once instead of twice. One hospital bill, one anesthesiologist...and maybe only one surgeon, we'll have to see. At any rate, I might be getting this all taken care of sooner than I planned. If I leave the stone in there I run the risk of having it go to my liver and diseasing it, or breaking through the wall and letting bile into my bloodstream. Neither of these is a terribly attractive option, so I will probably just have the damn thing removed.

Anyways...sorry I haven't updated in a bit. It's been a busy time - school (I'm a full B student!!!), work...and lots of doc visits. I'll update more when I know more.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That would be very cool if they could do both at the same time! I know the gallbladder surgery is lap b/c my stepmom had hers removed that way... all she ended up w/was a little 1" scar at the top of her belly button, so she decided to get it pierced to help hide it :-)

Gosh Jen... I sooo have my fingers crossed that all this works out for you!

Anonymous said...

whoa! That's pretty crazy they just happened to find it! But glad they did. Totally hope they are able to get them both done at the same time. I'll keep my fingers crossed for you!