You heard what I said. Acute cholecystitis and biliary pancreatitis.
Cholycystis is the fancy word for gallbladder, "gall" being bile, or the "coleric" humor in the old Humorism concept of human health. Gotta have those humors in balance, right?
Biliary pancreatitis is where your pancreas gets irritated, inflamed, basically super pissed off. The pancreas is the chemical plant of the body, it makes insulin, pancreatic polypeptide (????) and something called pancreatic juice.
Why "juice"? I don't think of "juice" as a medical term. I guess it is though.
What happened? Well, my gallbladder filled up with stones, and from time to time, one of them got passed through my Main Bile Duct, and when it was a difficult passage, it made me feel gross. My tummy would hurt and my pancreas (I know now) would get upset and hurt as well.
A gall stone got stuck in that main bile duct sometime before Christmas Eve, causing my whole digestive tract to give up, shut down, say "NOPE" as clearly as possible, so anything I ate or drank came back up the way it went down (except much more unpleasantly.)
I got more and more uncomfortable, until my wife drove me to the emergency room and they admitted me to the hospital, calmed my extremely intense pain down with opiates, palpated my abdomen, gave me two IV antibiotics as a preventative (?????), passed my torso through the opening of a CT machine, and declared that I would need my gallbladder yeeted into the biohazard bin.
I asked so many times if I could keep my extracted gallbladder but everybody said no. I wanted to make it into a hacky-sack. Turns out though, the "stones" aren't actually mineral stones, they're made of cholesterol or bilirubin or blood ewwww and I bet it smells bad, so I'm okay with them just throwing it away.
It was big, though. I have a "four inch" (less than three inch real measurement) incision right below my lower right rib cage where they had to pull out the gallbladder.
The pain before and after the surgery was intense. Worst pain of my life before, even worse pain after. Somebody mentioned within my earshot post-surgery that my uncomfortably bloated abdominal cavity was filled with "a straw-colored fluid" which (in my imagination) became pancreatic juices and enzymes eagerly trying to digest my liver, intestines, bladder, kidneys... as though somebody had inflated the muscle/skin balloon surrounding my guts (this happened -- they use carbon dioxide gas) and rubbed Frank's Red Hot all over my entrails. Ow ow ow ow. Plus, the bloating was severe and got worse, making it impossible to take full breaths.
Well anyway, that was two weeks ago. I'm weak, skinny, exhausted, but basically pain-free using OTC pain meds (severe family history of opiate abuse so No Thanks, Prescription Painkillers!) and as of today I'm allowed to lift more than 20 pounds (9.071847 kilograms exactly) so I can get myself back in shape.
Some of you will have donated to my "Fix Juanito's Tum-Tum" fundraiser to help pay medical expenses, and for that, thank you so so much. Mutual aid is a grimly heartwarming bandaid for our extremely broken, abusive system of paying for medical care. Thank you again.
