So, as some of you are aware, I had a couple of gallbladder flare ups in mid-May that put me into the ER for 3 hours one night and made me make the decision to have my gallbladder removed. That was performed last Friday in what was considered an uneventful surgery. I went in at 7:45 and was back home before noon.
Saturday was painful, but expected to be, but not too bad. We had some friends over to play board games and the only thing that really hurt was if they made me laugh. I played Sunday night on the computer, but things were starting to feel worse instead of better. I had a bit of an issue Sunday that hurt badly for a couple hours, but it passed.
Monday I called the nurse line to see if they had concerns about what was going on with me, but they kept insisting it must just be constipation. That it would be made worse by taking my pain meds had me not taking my pain meds in hopes I could finally poop. The whole terrible Monday culminated with me in the fetal position on the floor of my bathroom giving myself an enema. That worked, but it really didn't do much to make me feel any better. Monday night, I did sleep a bit. During this whole ordeal I've maybe gotten 2-3 consecutive hours of sleep. I fall asleep from exhaustion while sitting up or whenever, but very rarely am I actually in my bed for long. I hadn't gotten out of the chair I was trying to sleep in until maybe 5:30 Tuesday morning, but when I did, things were far worse.
I couldn't stand upright. I could barely breathe. Everything hurt. I couldn't pee. I had no thirst. My wife was in the shower when I finally went in and told her we had to go to the hospital. My neighbor came over to take care of our girls, and we were off. We got to the ER and the put me on some stronger pain meds, but they did virtually nothing. Finally they put me in a CT scan. The hardest part was the deep breath they want you to hold through that. The blood tests they did showed elevated liver and pancreas numbers, but the CT scan wasn't definitive either. I got my first ever ambulance ride over to the hospital my surgeon works at. They set me up in my room and scheduled me for another surgery at 4. The plan was to do an endoscopy where they'd knock me out, go down my throat, then up the bile duct from the bottom to see if a stone had escaped when they removed the gall bladder. They'd pull it out and that'd be it.
Surgery finally came and my doctor had also discovered that the complications had caused a leak in my bile duct and some fluid was pooling in my abdomen. He was going to reopen a couple of my laparoscopic incisions and try to flush it out, if it seemed like there was a lot in there. It was about 4:15. The guessed it'd take 40-90 minutes. Then I was out.
I came to in recovery close to 8 pm. I was shivering so bad they had 2 huge heating pads on me and heated blankets wrapping my face. There were 4 nurses trying to get me warm as I shook so bad the oxygen mask couldn't stay on. I finally got warm and they brought me back up to my room. None of the nurses in recovery knew anything about what had happened in surgery, so I had to wait to talk with my family who had met with the doctor.
Turns out I had something called a Duct of Luschka, which is an extra bile duct that in my case connected to the kidney, kinda. What it was really doing was causing the leak that filled my abdomen with 700 mL of bile. That was the cause of my apparently near orange colored eyes that Tuesday morning. They took care of the duct, put a stint in my bile duct so there's no way there can be additional build of of bile, and flushed out the 700 mL of bile. Oh yea, at 2 hours into the surgery, someone decided I needed a catheter. I hate that person.
I stayed overnight in the hospital and was released a bit after 3 yesterday afternoon. I'm still dealing with some weird things, like being freezing cold when I lay on either side and sweating like a pig on a spit when I lay on my back. My pillow has gotta be holding 2-3 gallons of sweat. Otherwise, things are improving. I still get winded trying to talk too much, but my pain is greatly reduced. Where I was getting down to a 6 on a good day a few days ago, I'm now riding a 2 or 3 all the time while still going light on the pain meds.
So there you go. Getting old sucks and having rare complications sucks worse. Apparently if I'd have just tried to ride it out and kept believing the nurses that it was just constipation, after 7 days about 44% of people with what I had going on die. So there's that.
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Originally Posted by Drewbie
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