Check Up and Out

My nutty sister is back in Seattle after a holiday in Europe where she must have left half dozen Swiss people scratching their heads and wondering what hit them.  She called me just now in a sleep deprived, jet lagged stupor and tried to play twenty questions with my gall bladder being the main topic of interest.

This exercise, surely derived from the same family as Chinese water torture, led me to realize that my voice could soar through crescendos I had thought not possible previously. Several dogs in the neighborhood have fled due to the shrill pitch, and now I’ve doubled the work of the BCSPCA. Thank goodness I give them biannual donations.

Meanwhile, Lanes’ best friend is spending the day, and he no doubt will go home and complain that he is scared of me.  Poor child. Between my hysteria and Lanes’ propensity to randomly hug him, I don’t know what’s to become of him.

The reason for my sister’s interrogation (or rather ‘in-terror-gation), is because I’ve been scanned so many times now that I’m waiting to be bagged and checked out. 

In addition to random bouts of pain in my side, I have been battling with hives the entire summer. I really think that one should get a license to surf the internet, because through unsupervised research, I concluded that I have gallstones and the hives were a direct result of these. I also decided that I needed a liver transplant (at which point my diligent spouse, P, slammed his palm into his head).

I was further vindicated when my homeopath made the same diagnosis (without being preempted by me).  However, he suggested that I lay off the internet for unsolicited medical advice and assured me that I do not need a liver transplant. He did, however, strongly urge me to get my gall bladder and liver scanned.

After waiting around for almost two months, I finally had my appointment last week.  I was under strict instructions not to eat or drink anything for twelve hours. For someone who is constantly thinking of food, being asked to be cut off from it for half a day was horrific. 

I decided to sleep as much as I could and put post it notes around our ghetto fabulous apartment reminding me not to accidentally drink water in the morning, the time of day my brain patterns most resemble that of a zombie.

I was so busy deciding that I would surely collapse from the lack of food in my system that I didn’t think to be nervous about the scan. P was determined to tag along, but since he is in the business of dispensing unwanted medical advice, I thought it would be better for my sanity if he was busy taking our six year old, Lanes, to daycare.

Of course on the way there, P calls me saying Lanes has had the runs and he was home with her. He wanted to know since I already had half the day off, at my new job, mind you, if I could take the rest of it off and come home and stay with her.

Meanwhile back at the radiology office, half the technicians were out sick, so I was told that my appointment that was to be at 9am might be pushed back.

My stomach growled violently and my head spun as I waited for my appointment to be over with so that I could stuff my face. I was lamenting that I could no longer walk across the way and indulge in several bar-b-que pork buns, because I had to run home.

Before I knew it, my angry digestive tract and I were whisked into a room. I thought I was getting only my liver and gall bladder scanned, but they threw in my kidneys, intestines and what not in with the deal. I knew it was a bad sign when the technician put the ‘mouse’ on my gall bladder and said ‘you were not supposed to eat breakfast!’.

Considering I looked like I was answering a casting call for ‘Les Miserables’ she apologized and said not to mind what she just said. That’s when I knew she found something! The rest of the scan seemed to take forever and I was getting confused between pushing my stomach in and out.  

I have never in my life purposely made a concerted effort to puff my stomach out. It seemed so unnatural, that this simple order took a lot of concentration.

By the time I was done, P and Lanes came to pick me up and after we were secured at home and I was fed, P jet propelled himself to work. Lanes had a marvelous recovery, which made me wonder if it all was a ploy to stay home.

She was packed off to daycare the next day, feeling right as rain, but then in the afternoon she threw up the lunch she never ate. That’s how we wound up at the doctor’s office for the third time that week. It seems she had caught a stomach bug.

Lanes is now back to her normal self, and as I type this, she is involved in an intricately nonsensical conversation with her best friend. P, meanwhile, is surfing the web and coming up with all kinds of charming remedies for my gall bladder.

On Monday, I got a call from my GP asking me to come in immediately to discuss my scan results.  That put me in a tizzy and I left in search of dim sum to drown my sorrows.  P decided he was taking time off work and invited himself by force to my appointment.

I knew he had researched because when I returned home cranky from my fruitless attempt to find Chinese food, he supplied me with twenty questions I had to ask the doctor even before I took my shoes off to get into the house.

I blanked him out, which resulted in him being even more determined to come and torment our GP.  When I walked in with P looming around behind me, the doctor and his assistant couldn’t help giggling and asked me if I thought I needed backup!

Long story short, I did indeed have gall stones. Lots of them apparently, with two huge ones to boot. When they told me that I felt rather lumpy—like I had marbles in the right side of my abdomen. So that’s where all the marbles I lost along the way had accumulated.

The doctor suggested that with the proper diet and exercise the stones could dissolve. P chimed in, fearfully at least, that losing weight helps. No wonder they say there is a fine line between being bravery and stupidity. At that point the doctor probably feared for P’s safety.

P has done more research on how to dissolve gall stones and he has come up with this charming concoction involving drinking Epson salts and olive oil. Just the thought of it makes me gag. Adding to my nausea is the thought of P and my nutty sister joining forces to plan the future of my body parts. Perhaps it is easier to just break up with my gall bladder. More musings from BC next week…