The walls of the gall bladder are set up to withstand it, same as the walls of the stomach are set up to withstand its own corrosive conditions. Often (for example when my grandma had gall bladder stones), it hurts when it contracts, i.e., when it expels the bile into the digestive tract - which is to say, when you eat.
featherlou, the diet change is a bit of a pain to manage at first; I imagine they’ve already told you, but your husband should now eat smaller portions more often. This is because his bile will now be going directly from the liver to the intestine, without that “bile-resistant” buffer; if enough bile is there with no food to attack… well, I suspect the guy who wrote Alien had serious tummy problems.
Heh - that would be truly funny, as it might be his own construction company doing the work. I can just see it now, Jim on the cellphone to his boss; “Could you shut down the Foothills site for a couple of days? I’m trying to sleep here.”
They haven’t told us much about his long-term prognosis. His nurses have all been pretty good; apparently, once you get in the hospital and start getting looked after, the care isn’t too bad; it’s the process getting here that has been a full-on bitch. I’ll ask them more stuff today about how this will all go.
Oh, Jim wasn’t sick at all from the anesthetic, either. Maybe he got the new, improved version, too. I can tell you that puking for five hours after an abdominal laparoscopy was indeed sub-optimal.
My sister had her gall bladder taken out a while ago, and she eats constantly just like she did before the surgery. They told her to stay away from stuff like fatty pork, but she eats tons of it. Then she spends the whole rest of the day in the bathroom.
It’s NEVER a good sign when she’s tearing into a pork roast.
While they don’t normally give people their gallstones back, they made an exception for Jim - we think it’s because of the size of the main attraction. The big stone is about the same size and shape as a black olive - the doctor said it is the largest stone they have ever seen! :eek: We suspect his eating habits won’t have to change much, because a stone that size wasn’t leaving much room in the gall bladder to start with.
(The others were much smaller - they gave us one of those for comparison. It’s just wee - more tic tac sized, except in an X shape.)
Jim is very impressed with himself for achieving such a massive gallstone. He’s recovering nicely - he’s all over the clear foods, walking up and down the hallway a couple times a day, and doing everything he can to get back to normal as soon as possible. We’re hoping for solid foods today. Go mashed potatoes!
Best wishes to Jim, and well done for not following up on that retarded suggestion to sneak food to him! Based on this thread, I’ll give gallstones a miss, thankyouverymuch.
Well, he’s still pretty groggy and fades in and out. He’s on as much clear juice as he wants, but the morphine makes him nauseous, so he still isn’t taking much in. The doctors refuse to give even a ballpark for when he’ll be getting out. My head, throat and face hurt, and I’m so tired I feel like puking - my head cold seemed to have gotten worse today instead of better. I seriously did not know that being the spousal support person for a sick person was so hard, with no recognition whatsoever - just one slog after the next. To top it off, I think the hospital goes out of their way to make things more difficult for spouses of sick people. Those of you who have nursed spouses through longterm illnesses, my hat is off to you.
This week well and truly sucked. Sucked sucked sucked. Wah.
Well, I’m glad to hear he’s through the surgery O.K., and I hope you’re feeling better soon. Please remember to do what’s necessary for yourself, or you’re going to be worse than useless to your family. I’m surprised they’ll let you near him if you’re ill.
It’s interesting to hear your account of the hospitals uncooperativeness. I’ve had relatively few occasions to have to deal with a hospitalized relative, but I must note that my experience has been the opposite. When my daughter had her appendix out, the hospital gave me a cot, meals, anything I wanted, to stay in the room with her as she recuperated. They could not have been more helpful.
When my dad was terminally ill, my sister and I also visited regularly and at odd hours, partly for convenience and partly to be sure he was properly cared for, since the hospital workers never knew when one of us would show up.
My husband’s bypass surgery was an emergency, and he was out of the hospital in 4 days, so I really didn’t need to do that much.
Half the time I can’t even get a chair to sit beside my husband’s bed. The kitchen on the floor has a sign on it “THIS KITCHEN FOR STAFF AND PATIENT USE ONLY” (I’ve been taking stuff and using the kitchen regularly anyway - my taxes paid for all that stuff in there). They have extra meals on the floor every day, and they would rather throw them in the garbage than give them to spouses of sick people (one nursing assistant gave us extra dinners one day - I suspect she wasn’t supposed to). There’s no lounge on the floor - it’s been converted to a hospital room. The staff have been okay; this is all small potatoes, of course, but it has been abundantly clear that they are barely able to take care of the patients; the support people for the patients are obviously not a consideration.
No, I probably shouldn’t have been around my husband when my cold was still contagious - I was very careful around him, and it seemed to have worked, since I didn’t pass it on to him.
If the hospital would stop and think a minute, they’d realize that they are missing out on the chance to save themselves some work. Sure, you’re not going to take his vital signs, change the IV or administer meds, but you’re going to do a lot of other chores, given some human courtesy. I know when I was staying with my kid in hospital for a couple of days I did a number of routine chores that saved the nursing staff trouble. They had a (relatively) calm patient instead of a crying child ringing the buzzer for one little thing after another. I’m sure you were willing to take care of a lot of comfort things and alleviate their burden.
Glad he didn’t get your cold! That would have been awful.
Well, the thing of it is that spouses/support people will do all that stuff anyway, without any consideration from the hospital staff, because that’s my husband lying there. We’re in a real healthcare crunch in Calgary right now, and one of the things that’s fallen by the wayside is help for patient support people, but what bothers me about this is that if our healthcare system ever gets fixed again, I don’t know if they’ll start helping support people again - once you’ve gotten people used to a bad thing, you can continue it indefinitely.
Last (probably) update: Jim’s home and taking it easy now. It will probably be three or four weeks until his staples come out and he goes back to work, but every day he gets a little stronger and healthier.
