[Primateus]

This last Saturday I decided, as one does, that I was too lazy to cook dinner. So instead I ordered a pizza.

After I ate the whole thing, the whole dang thing, I felt okay. But alas, t'was not to last, and I starting feeling bloated and like I had indigestion into the evening.

Lots of cold sweats and stomach hurties later, I started vomiting, quite profusely even.

But okay, it's just indigestion, right? It'll be over tomorrow, right? I've had it before, it can't possibly be that much different from the other times, right?

Okay, Sunday comes along, of course with little to no sleep and the fever starts kicking in for real.

Okay, maybe this was just a little bit worse than normal, but hey, I've had a fever before, so no worries, I'll be okay Monday morning, fit for fight and ready to go to work.

So there I were, Monday morning, calling my boss and telling him I have to head downstairs to the doctor (My doctor's practice is on the groundfloor of my building, very convenient!), and being a caring boss, despite everything, he wishes me well and says hopefully we'll see eachother Tuesday.

But, such luck was not to be. The Doctor looked me over, took a small blood sample to test for infection (121, apparently that's a lot?) So he calls the emergency intake at the Hospital in Randers and tells me he's admitting me, because I've got an infection in the gallbladder.

So, a co-worker drives me there immediately, and I'm taken in. I wait for a few minutes before the nurse comes and brings me to an examination room. This part is all very regular and stuff, I'm sure you can imagine how that works. The good Doctor Roald arrives with an ultrasound scanner and starts looking me over. He says the bladder wall is thicker than it's supposed to be and that there's a few stones.
He asks if a medical student of his can take a look too, and I agree, why not? Young people gotta learn, and I don't mind.

So, then I get taken for the bigger ultra sound scanner, lady doctor, very cute and from the same region I'm from, huzzah!

I get taken back to the emergency intake and another medical student shows up to look me over, this one a surgical medstudent, apparently? Later, he brings his boss along and they tell me that I'm getting surgery, because they've decided that my gall bladder has got to go, because appparently it's got it coming to it!

So, into the hospital patient outfit I go, and up to the Stomach & Intestine ward I go, where I get a single room (nice!) and all the saftevand I can possibly drink, until midnight when I'm no longer allowed to drink or eat anything.

A couple of friends stop by around dinner time with a sandwich. They meant well and got exactly what I wanted, it just wasn't very good. But "luckily" I could only get down about a third of it.

So, after they leave, I lie there in my bed, listening to my audiobook and really just wait around for the time to go to bed.

Of course, I don't sleep very much, but the time eventually comes when they roll me down to the surgery ward. I wait outside the room for ten to fifteen minutes as they prepare and finally they walk me in and put me on the so-called table. They don't really use actual tables anymore, it's more of a kind stretcher/bed that can shift and change position as needed.

I tell a quick anecdote about a book I once read about a kinda sorta similar situation, but where the guy ended up going to the hospital for a minor surgery, and due to some drunken Orderly shenanigans, comes out with a pair of boobs and a sex-change. And I ask them if we're all agreed that I'm there to have my gallbladder removed.

We all agree, and they start prepping me with oxygen until, finally, the nice anasthesia doctor tells me she's going to put me under. I feel it working, and, totally special and unique as I am, decided I'm DEFINITELY going to fight it.

That's the last thing I remember until I wake up off the operating table and on my own bed again, being rolled into the recovery ward. There, a pair of nice nurses brings me bread with cheese, more lovely saftevand, and also ice water, all while they have to deal with my totally manly stubbornness.

Mostly, that's just because when they wanted me to stand up, they first wanted me to sit for a few minutes, whereas I decided if I could sit, then I could also stand.

Turns out, for once, I was actually right. I could stand just fine, even walk. So, they told me to walk down to the end of the room and go to the toilet. But I was absolutely forbidden from locking the door.

Fair.

But, there was no business to be had, so I return to my bed. On the way back, I notice another lady is eating a filur, which is a delicious ice cream on a stick.

So I get one, then another. I ate two ice creams on the recovery ward, two frigging ice creams, and it was glorious!

The surgeon comes in to tell me how it all went. It went well, he said, though he did have to make the surgical cuts bigger than first anticipated as it was an infected situation. The bladder was quite green, they discovered (I thought that's what we were supposed to do?) and it was a veritable gravel pit. More than a hundred, ONE HUNDRED!!!, gall stones were in there. Where they came from I do not know, I certainly hadn't felt any of them before.

So, he told me that I wasn't going home that Tuesday afternoon, I had to stay until Wednesday, today, because I had to have a lot of anti-biotics, because of the infection.

Got moved to another room because another paitent, an elderly woman suffering with severe dementia, needed a private room in order to feel safe. Also fair. So I got moved into another room where I, despite being 43, lowered the average age quite significantly.

And now, I am home again. I got home this afternoon and my stomach is starting to hurt like fucker.

Which is normal, I'm told, as the anasthesia is beginning to leave the body and doing so quicker than all the air they filled me up with in order to be able to see and move around.

And I still haven't been able to take a shit since Saturday afternoon.

Anyone else want to share stories of surgeries?

[worry]

Primateus, on 11 December 2024 - 10:21 PM, said:

I got home this afternoon and my stomach is starting to hurt like fucker.

Probably a case of stomach stones.

[Lady Bliss]

Good grief! That sounds horrible but at least you are well now!

[Primateus]

worry, on 11 December 2024 - 11:36 PM, said:

Primateus, on 11 December 2024 - 10:21 PM, said:

I got home this afternoon and my stomach is starting to hurt like fucker.

Probably a case of stomach stones.

Can't be, they took those. And unless they took 'em out with an industrial shovel, they really shouldn't have missed any of them.

[Tsundoku]

OK, I'll go.

When I was a few weeks old, it was discovered I had something called a pyloric stenosis
https://en.wikipedia...yloric_stenosis
They ended up giving me the vertical incision, and it has also grown as I did, to about 10cm or so. I usually tell people who ask that I was stabbed.

When I was about 6, I had such a bad case of tonsillitis that I apparently would have been dead in a few days had they not operated. Up to that point, I'm told I wasn't a very healthy child, always getting ill etc. But from after that point I've had a pretty good immune system. Weird, huh?

In 2012 I had "The Snip". Took 6 weeks to fully recover. True story.

Earlier this year, I had a colonoscopy because old. Do not recommend.

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 12 December 2024 - 08:52 AM

[TheRetiredBridgeburner]

Glad you're on the mend!

Appendicitis when I was 12 - incidentally how we found out I'm allergic to penicillin. They gave me a liquid form of it and the instantaneous projectile vomiting was really quite something to behold (I'm told).

Had a benign tumour removed from an upper saliva gland, six years ago this week in fact. Caused some very funny (in hindsight) facial nerve damage (now almost totally recovered). Had to do exercises (blinking, raising eyebrows, blowing air into my cheeks and holding my lips shut) tens of times a day to try and make the nerve work, which made me look slightly mental but did seem to do the trick, now I just get a slight drag of my bottom lip if I'm really tired.

My fondest memory of it was the complete nerd joy my surgeon had about it because they whole team had never seen a benign tumour behave like mine (the growth rate made them treat it as cancerous even though the biopsy was clear) - listening to them talk about it the way David Attenborough would if he discovered a new species of something furry was genuinely hilarious.

This post has been edited by TheRetiredBridgeburner: 12 December 2024 - 10:19 AM

[Tiste Simeon]

Congrats on your new boobs!

Dang Prim that sounds rough. I'm glad you're on the mend and I hope you get some good pooping done soon!

[Abyss]

Quote

More than a hundred, ONE HUNDRED!!!, gall stones were in there.

The.
Fuck.


Did you just lose 20lbs?

[Primateus]

Abyss, on 12 December 2024 - 02:53 PM, said:

Quote

More than a hundred, ONE HUNDRED!!!, gall stones were in there.

The.
Fuck.

Did you just lose 20lbs?

No, but I do feel like I'm leaning more to the left, at least more so than usual.

[amphibian]

Gotta readjust the ballast of Good Ship Primateus every now and then, I see.

Glad you're almost back to full sail again.

I've had two official lumpectomies and one unofficial attempted one. When I was 13, I noticed a lump that was somewhat painful in one nipple (I'm a male, so this is slightly outside the norm). It was a tiny bit of gynecomastia and since it hurt, I wanted it out. It was determined to be exactly that and nothing more happened.

Then in mid 2022, a lump appeared almost dead center between my shoulder blades and it sent sharp stabbing pains every now and then when I moved in bed or twisted. I brought some booze over to my brother's to have him take a look at it. His girlfriend ended up coming home after a shift to us at the kitchen island, him with a sterilized Xacto knife trying to poke around at it. Alas, it was too deep to get out that way. Stick a bandage on it and finished the booze.

So I got what was identified as a cyst taken out by a doctor who spent all of 15 minutes digging it out and closing me back up. Well worth taking care of because putting up with that pain wasn't what I wanted to be doing.

Taking care of problems like this is a good thing to be doing. I'm glad there's many stories of people here getting that done.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

But what is the definition [evil scientist voice]... of "surgery"?

Here's a massive surgical horror story:

Quote

Removing a splinter? Treating a wart? If a doctor does it, it can be billed as surgery

[...] the doctor noticed a little splinter in the child's palm. "He must have gotten it between the front door and the car," [...] the child wasn't complaining. The doctor grabbed a pair of forceps — aka tweezers — and pulled out the splinter in "a second," [...] That brief tug was transformed into a surgical billing code: Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code 10120, "incision and removal of a foreign body, subcutaneous" — at a cost of $414.

Spoiler

"This was ridiculous," [...] "There was no scalpel." He was so angry that he went back to the office to speak with the manager, who told him the coding was correct because tweezers could make an incision to open the skin.

[... At] her annual skin check this year, she mentioned her clothing was irritating a skin tag she had. The doctor froze the tag with liquid nitrogen. "It was squirt, squirt. That's it," Schilders told me. She was "floored" by an explanation of benefits that said the simple treatment had been billed as $469 for surgery.

Assuming the bill was a mistake, she called the doctor's office and was told that surgery had indeed occurred — because the skin was broken in the process. Hence surgical CPT code 17110, "destruction of 1-14 benign lesions."

Schilders complained to her insurer, who provided a document informing her that "surgery is classified as something entering the body, such as a Q-tip entering the ear canal [...]

"[...] the idea is you can charge more if it's a surgical procedure,"

Removing a splinter? Treating a wart? If a doctor does it, it can be billed as surgery - Alternet.org

[Mezla PigDog]

Good luck with that poop when it comes. The first poo I had after my c-section I thought my insides were going to burst out of the incision. It was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time because it had been many days and I really needed to go. Plus the air they fill you up with and that gets in due to all of the rummaging feels weird - peppermint tablets are good for it if you can't shift it.

I've had another 2 abdominal surgeries since, both key hole so less poop issues but the air was a big deal. I woke up from one and had so much morphine it is one of the happiest, most contented memories of my life, just lying there feeling like I was on a cloud and the recovery room clock hands were spiralling around - I assume that bit wasn't real but I will never know.

[Primateus]

So, at this point in time, the poop, like the spice, is flowing (not at this exact moment!!!). And it has more or less stopped hurting in my stomach. I'll be having the staples taken out on Friday, which is also my last day of official recuperation. Right on time for the holiday, very convenient.

Edit: Speaking of the poop flowing. I mean, it's really the little things in life you learn to appreciate once you lose them. Like sitting, a fresh breeze, a good shit, etc.

This post has been edited by Primateus: 16 December 2024 - 08:08 PM

[Tiste Simeon]

I'm so happy for your poop that it released!

Hope it doesn't mean you have to miss too many Christmas goodies.

[Fid]

Commiserations with that surgery - it’s no laughing matter. Bringing back memories of my gall bladder incident in 2008 when I was rushed to A&E with what felt like a heart attack but was in fact my gall bladder abscessing onto the bile duct and being massively infected. After they dealt with the infection they scheduled removal which was meant to be by keyhole surgery - hah - massive incision and told it was 3rd worst the specialist had seen that year. No driving for 8 weeks and no Malazan BBQ with Hetan and Malaclypse but has been ok since. Hope your recuperation is straightforward and quick. At least you know why evisceration not recommended.