Vonnieness

So I promised an entry about my surgery...
...and I totally forgot. So her it goes, from the beginning.

Around August of last year, I started getting sick. I thought it was just some morning sickness due to the pregnancy, so I ignored it. I couldn't eat anything too greasy, or anything that would make me bloat, so when J had made some sweet potatoes with greens and pork and beans, I spent most of that night vomiting and then some. Everything was coming out of both ends. But since I was pregnant at the time, I didn't think twice about it.

Around December/Christmas, it happened again. This time, I was very scared. I had thrown up so much that I had started vomiting blood. I felt terrible, and I felt even worse because I was in the bathroom so much I couldn't nurse Iris, so I had my brother-in-law give her a bottle. I called the Emergency Room and spoke to the on call doctor. He said not to worry, I was too young for an ulcer and it was probably that I ate something my body didn't like.

Two months later, and I'm still sick. J thinks it's my diet. So I change it and nothing helps. I go to the doctor and he says I have hemorrhoids, so I get meds and take care of that. I'm still miserable, but J thinks I'm being a drama queen and a hypochondriac and that it's still just my diet. He thinks I'm making myself throw up. I just wanted to punch him.

Fast forward to June, four months later. I am sick on my birthday vomiting for hours. Later in the week, I am sick again and vomit all night. J thinks it's because we are on vacation and I've been eating junk. I am on the phone with my friend Meg and she mentions my gallbladder. Her brother is a vet and her mother is a nurse. I tell myself to go see a doctor as soon as we get back.

When we get home from vacation it gets worse. I am vomiting every day. I cannot eat. I changed my diet to a liquid diet just so I could survive the days. I am miserable, in pain, I have vomiting and diarrhea so bad that I end up bleeding and it feels like a I have a ping-pong ball wedge underneath my right ribcage. Meg mentions my gallbladder again. I look it up and mention it to J. He thinks I'm being over dramatic and that I'm self-diagnosing. So I go to the doctor and he prescribes me some pain medicine and some anti-nausea medicine as well. I stay with the liquid diet because I am nursing and I cannot take phenegran when breastfeeding.

Of course, as you know, I end up needing surgery and while in surgery they find a gallstone the thickness of my pinky lodged in one of the gallbladder's ducts. J looked at the picture in surprise and said "It looks like trying to shove a tennis ball through a garden hose."You'll see what he meant if you go to the previous post and check out the picture.

And, as you also know, the surgery went fantastically, and I feel great. My surgeon was awesome, my doctor is awesome, and my nurse (who oddly enough is my doctor's wife) was beyond awesome. I hated being in that hospital. I hate hospitals. But I needed to get better. I missed my girls. I hadn't realized just how much of my entertainment comes from them until I was stuck in the hospital and didn't want to be there.

I'm healed completely. It was just a couple of incisions that they used to stick the camera in and use the tools to cut out my gallbladder, sew up my insides, and pull the gallbladder through a tube. Its amazing what doctors can do.