The First Thing I Remember Was The Belching

I’ve alluded to it, but for those of you who don’t already know, I got to spend a little time vacationing at the Foothills Medical Centre recently. Just in case you’re curious…

(Warning: long, boring, full of self-pity, and possibly TMI)

For the past few years, I’d been having attacks of moderate abdominal pain. They only occurred once every few months or so, would start as a slight ache after having a bit too much to eat, and intensify later on in the evening or night. I thought it was just plain old indigestion or heartburn, due to the correlation with food and since it would go away after an hour or two after taking some Pepto or Rolaids. Just part of the process of turning into an old fart, right?

Well, around a month ago, I had an attack that was slightly different. A minor ache that started just after a group pizza lunch on Wednesday at the office flared up to a full attack sometime around midnight. The pain was only slightly stronger than usual, but still strong enough that I paced around the apartment just to try and get my mind off it, and sleep was out of the question. It didn’t really seem any different than the previous times though, until the vomiting started a couple hours later. Normally I’m like Seinfeld, in that I couldn’t even remember the last time I threw up, so that was definitely unusual. I kept waiting it out though, hoping it would clear itself up as usual.

When 5am rolled around without any relief and a couple more visits to the porcelain bowl, I finally said to myself “fuck this.” Not being very familiar with the medical community, I wasn’t sure if I should head to a clinic or what first, but offhand I didn’t know any that were open that early anyway, so I called a cab and headed to the emergency entrance at the Foothills hospital. If you’ve never been to the emergency admitting of a hospital, it’s not nearly as hectic as TV might lead you to believe. Unless you have trauma or are about to keel over dead, you just get to talk to bored clerks as they fill out forms, interspersed with waiting in a hallway until the next person comes along with more forms.

Eventually though, they led me to an emergency bed, where I got to put on the traditional gown and wait for the doctor. The nurses gave me some morphine for the pain, but it didn’t seem to do much good and just triggered my nausea instead, leading to a scramble to find a plastic bowl. The doctor arrived, and after some poking and prodding, came up with a potential suspect that I wasn’t expecting at all: gallstones. I was whisked away for an ultrasound, which quickly confirmed that my gallbladder was indeed inflamed and full of gallstones, one of which was probably firmly stuck in the bile duct.

The doctor and I discussed options, but there really aren’t very many when it comes to this. There are drugs which can dissolve the gallstones and sonic techniques to break them up, like kidney stones, but the drugs are expensive and neither solution gets rid of them entirely, so they’d just be back again in a year or two. Surgery to remove the gallbladder entirely is really the best option for people who can withstand it, since it fixes the problem once and for all. The surgery is usually done laparoscopically, so the impact is pretty low and recovery fairly quick.

They couldn’t send me home in my current condition though, as the pain still wasn’t going away, so they admitted me to a regular bed and put me on an antibiotic regimen to try and reduce the inflammation. If that was successful, they could then schedule surgery at a time more convenient to both the hospital and myself (which could have been a week, or ten months down the road, depending on your opinion of the state of our hospitals :P). After a day and a half on the antibiotics, with only intermittent sleep, the pain had gone down by about half but was still there. Based on that and the blood work, they must have decided that it wasn’t working well enough, and Saturday morning I was notified that they had put me on the emergency surgery list.

It’s still a relatively low-priority operation compared to other emergencies that they have to handle though, so I still had to wait a while. I watched some soccer, my mother arrived that afternoon to help out, and later on in the evening I tried to get some sleep. It didn’t last long though, and at around 11pm they woke me up and told me that it was time. I didn’t even know that they still did surgeries that late, and thought they’d just bumped it to the next day. Preparation for it was fairly uneventful; they wheeled me around a lot, I talked to the anaesthetist and answered questions about my medical history for the zillionth time, signed some forms, and got wheeled into the OR, where they strapped me down, plugged me in, and knocked me out.

When I woke up, I was full of gas. Laparoscopic surgeries pump your abdomen full of carbon dioxide, and after the surgery your body suddenly has to reabsorb a lot of it, so I was already burping nonstop as I regained consciousness. That only added to my disorientation, and I was apparently babbling incoherently (or trying to, between burps) about something or other. The staff soon realized that I wasn’t freaking out for any particularly important reason, and left me to belch myself silly in the recovery room. It was about 3am by this point, and I soon fell asleep.

The next day, I was feeling…different. The gallbladder pain was gone, but it was replaced by intermittent rolling waves of pain, from gas. There were still pockets trapped in my body, which would gradually get reabsorbed over the next few days as I moved around. There was also pain from the surgery sites whenever I moved around, and I was hooked up to a machine that would deliver morphine on demand, but again it didn’t seem to do much for me, so I barely used it. My mobility was also limited due to post-surgery fatigue, so there was also a set of pneumatic sleeves around my legs, to prevent blood clots from being immobile. Recovery was fairly quick though; by the afternoon I was moving around a lot more and by the next morning a lot of the gas pain was gone. By Monday afternoon I was feeling a lot better and had no trouble getting back on solid food (I had had nothing to eat or drink in the two and a half days between being admitted and the surgery itself, aside from an IV), so I was able to be discharged that afternoon. Total time in the hospital was about four and a half days.

There was still one slight glitch, though. After being discharged, I was supposed to call the doctor’s office and set up an appointment later that week for the removal of the surgical drain that was still inserted. When I called though, the receptionist said that they usually don’t take them out until after two or three weeks. Yikes! She said she’d check with the doctor and get back to me, though. It turned out that the doctor thought that I’d already had the drain removed, and mine was confused with a long-term drain for major surgeries. Apparently the drain would have been removed if I had stayed another day, but I was feeling better and discharged earlier than expected, so it wasn’t.

Luckily, I was still able to get in to see him and have it removed the next day. (Having a piece of rubber tubing pulled out from inside you feels weird.) This was also the first chance I’d had to talk to him post-surgery, and I discovered that the surgery had lasted longer than expected. He almost had to abandon the laparoscopic approach and revert to a traditional incision due to heavy scarring on the gallbladder from those previous attacks. He was skilled enough to make it work in the end, fortunately, since a large incision would have required a much longer recovery.

Recovery wasn’t completely over, as I still had twinges of pain from the surgery sites, bouts of lightheadedness, and digestive problems from all the antibiotics. It was just a matter of suffering through them though, and by the second week home I was feeling well enough to head back to work.

And now the incision scars and drain site are pretty much healed up. And forming dimples on my belly… Overall, the experience went fairly smoothly thanks to the hospital staff. But I still hope I won’t be back there anytime soon…