My Gallbladder nearly killed me. Don't ignore yours!

            My Gallbladder nearly killed me. 

                               Don't ignore the signs!

I am a 40 year old man and have always considered myself untouchable. Only once have I had a flu bug thats put me in bed (On Christmas Day of all days!) and its very rare for me to get a cold. In a 13 year career at the same company I had only taken off about 3 days of sick leave in total.  

During my early 20's I had discovered the joys of fast food and had put on a fair bit of weight. During a lunch break myself and a colleage would devour a large Dominos Pizza each and have room for sandwiches and sausage rolls... Realising perhaps this was a bad idea I did something about it by going onto the "Cambridge Diet" in which you feed your body just 400 calories per day to get it to eat your internal fat. It worked and later on I took on the "Park Run" which gets you running a 3 mile course every Saturday for "fun." I tended to save my energy for the end where the audience was and then sprint it across the line - giving the impression that I was a really good runner, but in fact had just been lazy for 2.95 miles and given it all i got for 0.05 miles.. But in felt good and it got me healthier.

Fast forward to October of 2020. I had just changed jobs and we were having a huge house renovation completed. My wife had lost her father, and I had lost my beloved and beautiful cat "luna" to a sudden illness. Things were a little bit on the stressful side. I decided on one morning I would pick up a huge concrete Bulldog statue in the garden to get it out of the way of the builders - instead of letting them do it, or asking my wife to help me (which would have been the sensible thing to do) - The thing weighs about 6 stone. At the time i thought it was a great idea and got the job done.  Two days later i felt a dull ache in the centre of my chest. Being a stoic kind of person I put it down to either a bit of indegestion due to stress or that maybe i had pulled a muscle when i lifted the huge statue. I didnt think anything of it. After a week it had not improved, and on one morning I felt really sore just to the right of my chest, and found it quite hard to move about. My wife persuaded me to take the day off work and go to the Dr to get it checked. He prodded and poked me and thought it might be a stomach ulcer, which kind of made sense given the stress I had been under.  I was told to provide a stool sample to see if there was bacteria similar to that in an infected stomach ulcer. This came back clear and therefore the Dr assumed it was a very slight Ulcer and gave me some pills to calm my stomach.  It felt as though this was improving things after a few days but it still wasnt normal. I was able to eat as normal though.

On the 2nd November the house renovation was in full swing. We had no shower, the back of the house was a big hole, there was brick dust everywhere, and they were angle griding a huge iron girder. I had a really strange pain in my back which i had not noticed before but I pressed on with my work at my desk. I was on a call with a colleage when I felt my back getting a little worse. I tried to relax in my office chair to see if that made it felt better but it got worse and worse, and I was starting to feel a bit sweaty. Then all of a sudden I felt a twang in my chest and a stabbing pain. I was finding it hard to breathe and my heart was racing. Not wanting to make a fuss, i was able to finish the call with my colleage and not cause him any panic - but as soon as i tried to stand up from the desk I Realised I was in trouble. The pain was staggering and I could not do anything to make it feel comfortable. I made it upstairs to the bedroom where i could not sit down because of the pain, and all I could hear was angle grinding.  I called the Dr who pointed out it was their lunch time and that theyd call me back later.. I called 111 who told me that I should phone the Dr back and tell them I am an urgent case.. I did so and the Dr told me "i was on the list already!" - The pain was getting worse and I was really struggling to take deep breaths now. I called my wife who was on her way home and said that I think I need to call an ambulance. She got home in a few minutes and called 999. Within 2 minutes they were at the door as they suggested I was a category 1 due to the chest pain and breathing problems.. 

After some tests of my heart and finding nothing wrong with that, they were still concerned due to my pain and the breathing issues. I had also gone very very pale. They suggested I need to go to hospital, and this made my wife very very concerned. Due to Covid and the fact the house was in bits there was no way she could come with me. The paramedic suggested I would be in for some tests and then "kicked out in a few hours!"  they gave me some huge doses of morphone which did help but I was still in pain and struggling to breathe.  Once at the hospital I was put in a side room where I was promptly sick into my covid mask.. I was a little bit out of it at this point and even more confused when the Dr surgery rang me on my phone - 6 hours after I had initially made the call to the Dr and apparently being on the priority list, they wanted me to go in.. When i said "Im actually in hospital now" they didnt seem that concerned.  After a few hours I was sent for an X ray and they thought they could see Gallstones, but that I needed to be kept in for an Ultra sound in the morning to confirm it.  I was kept on a cocktail of drugs to keep me comfortable. Strangely the morphone and cocodamol didnt really touch the pain, it was the liquid IV paracetamol that had the most affect and did provide some relief.  The staff in the ward of the hospital were amazing and I cannot fault them at all.

The next day I was still very much in pain but my breathing had improved, but I was weak and not really able to walk huge distances and was hooked up to an IV machine so was wheeled about in a wheelchair. This was all pretty alien to me having never been in hospital since birth and I was dreafully missing my wife.  I had the ultrasound and this confirmed gallstones (lots of them and some huge) and that my gallbladder was infected. They suggested I might need to have emergency surgery to have the gallbladder removed there and then but as it was so infected and now 2 plus weeks since the first onset of pain it was a risky procedure. They would need to clear the infection and then I would need to come back to get the gallbladder removed.  they pumped me full of antibitoics and drugs in the hope of making me comfortable and to get rid of the infection. I had to stay another night so they could monitor me. At this point I was starting to turn yellow (jaundiced) and they were concerned a stone may be stuck. I was sent for an MRI to check this and I cant say I enjoyed 20 minutes confined in a tube with lots of clicky machine noises, but the staff there was amazing and put my mind at rest.  Later that day I got the result which confirmed a stone was stuck in the bile duct and I would need an MRCP (a camera down my throat and a de clogger) to get rid of the stone.  However the hospital was not able to do this for another 4 days, and they deemed it too risky for me to leave the hospital so I had to stay!! Then someone on the ward tested positive for Covid so we had to go into lockdown, meaning we could not leave the ward - which put pay to meeting my wife.. If this wasnt bad enough, there was a 90 year old man in the bed next to me who had had explosive poo episodes during the night, but decided he would not tell anyone and kept his clothes on. It was only noticed my staff when some "material" made it down his leg and onto the floor when he was walking to the toilet...  At this point I had been in hospital for 7 days and had had enough. I was barely eating anything as I was worried the pain would get worse.

3 days ticked away - not being able to eat very much and on a cocktail of painkillers (still the IV Paracetamol was the best). I was not able to sleep that much either, and the pain in my back came and went. The staff laughed at me because all I was able to eat for breakfast was a bread roll but it was all I could manage. I was turning more yellow and losing more weight. Confined to the ward just willing away days so that I could get the stone dislodged.  The night before my MRCP my wife sent a care package that included fruit, and drinks. Not having had more than water for nearly a week -  Ribena tasted great and i quickly drank a bottle of it. Then quickly regretted it as it felt like my tummy was going to explode, and my back pulled apart. Indeed most of the Ribena I had drunk soon made it out into a sick bowl.  That night the back pain was pretty horrendous but by morning it had gone. 

The day of the MRCP had arrived. The consultant came round and asked me to sign a form to say iw as happy to get it done. He explained there was a risk of complication where they may damage other organs, but that effectively I had no choice and if i left it another week i could be dead!? Obviously i agreed to getting it done and was soon wheeled in a hospital bed into an operating theatre. They laid me on the bed and sprayed some stuff in my throat that made me gag, then drugged me up. I cant remember anything after that until someone said "you are all gone" and i felt someone jam a sepository uo my back passage!!  It turns out that the Ribena the night before had made the stone get dislodged and allthat was left was a mark where a stone had been stuck and some grit. They were able to wash it all out and make my bile duct a little wider so that in the event another stone made its way down, it might be able to get out by itself!  I felt prety releived and no more back pain, but generally felt weak and still sore in my gallbladder area. It was still infected at this point and I was kept in hospital for another 3 days whilst they checked my Blood and Bilerubin levels to make sure I wasnt poisoning myself from the inside (I was pretty yellow at this point) and I could tell that after one blood test the Dr was pretty concerned at the levels still in my body.  It sucked not being able to go home, but also glad they were looking after me

Finally the Dr's confirmed that my levels were going down and they would be happy for me to go home, but that I would need my gallbladder removed - They put me on an emergency list as they were concerned about the state of it and me ending up back there again. 6 weeks later I came back for the day to get it removed.  I felt lucky to have had the care that I did, and to have it removed as quickly as that, particularly deep within the Covid crisis. I was very sore after the surgery, particularly the first night but it got easier and easier every day and in 2 weeks i felt like normal!

So the conclusion of this story is.. Dont be a hero, if you feel pain in your abdomen for any longer than a few days, get it checked out. Gallstones are so common, we all have them yet do not realise until one gets stuck and it is life threatening! Don't let it get worse!