For a couple weeks, a sense of heaviness, centered right behind your breastbone, above your stomach, gradually increases. You develop a sense of pain as a physical object, lodged in your center. It has weight and shape. It’s not a sharp pain; it’s like the pain you get when you press on a bruise. Only it’s at your very center of gravity.
Meanwhile, as you wait for your insurance coverage to kick in at your new job, your urine starts to get darker, day by day. And your poop is changing too: it’s growing gray, pale gray, and loose. After a couple of weeks of these gradual changes, it occurs to you on your last visit to the bathroom that you’re shitting oatmeal and pissing diet coke. Then you notice your eyes are turning yellow. People around you begin to notice your eyes are turning yellow, and they look at you skeptically when you tell them your insurance will kick in another week.
Two days before your insurance is activated, the white hot fist of god reaches down from the heavens, reaches into your center, and squeezes that heavy globe of pain, squeezes it like it’s the center of the universe and this is the only way he can prevent its sudden, violent end.
When you find yourself in a fetal position on the floor of the emergency room, this is a good time to tell them that your gallbladder has burst. Because until they’re convinced that this is the case, they will assume from your symptoms that you are, in fact, dying of cirrhosis of the liver. This means that you won’t get your vicodin right away, so this is very important. Once your get your first vicodin, the pain is still there, it’s still the center of the known universe, only now, the vicodin allows you to maintain an academic detachment. “Huh. That’s what agony is like. Interesting.”
Then, after your surgery, you will spend almost every waking moment of about the next three weeks trying to fart.