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I am now lacking a gall bladder.
Creeps 03/08/10, 03:31 | 
0 | A couple of weeks ago, after a week of gastronomical distress, I awoke at four in the morning to an inexplicable, crushing pain in my right side. After three hours of unrelenting suffering, I decided that heading to some kind of medical professional would be a good idea.
Lacking insurance, a local urgent care business (CareNow) seemed like a good idea. The doctor on staff kindly informed me that they don't keep an ultrasound handy for the weekends. Costs, you know. Instead, he poked my abdomen, revealing a very round-feeling object that felt like a gut mine of unpleasantness. He suggested that I go see a real doctor. No bill (whee!), some directions, and a few minutes later, we're off to a community ER.
Ten minutes of gnawing on my seatbelt later, I check in. Amidst the moans of the dying, I am finally given morphine by a Trekkie. We share our love of "Leverage". Life becomes dandy there, lying in a off-white hallway with my wife and some nurses amidst Population: Despair.
A kind student gentleman violates my person. I sing a crude variation of a coffee-jingle. He laughs.
He later uses me to demonstrate the method for finding hernias to his fellow female student. I laugh.
In time, I am wheeled into a fluorescent dungeon of sterility. My bed is community hospital clean, though the "splash-guard" pad (well used as it must have been) still bore a noisome greenish brown stain. Rotating cycles of nurses and others take turns giving me heprin shots, drawing my blood, and asking if I want more pain medication.
I am saddled with two delightful human wretches as roommates. One loudly panics himself into a blood pressure of 240+ over the coarse of six hours and is removed. The other is a young man in a halfway house who spends the next several nights with a thirty year old mother of five, his days with the soon to be mother of his child, and his hours alone with a 17 year old cheerleader on his phone. Both are worthy of their own entries.
After six heprin shots later and two days of unfolding human drama, I'm wheeled off to surgery. "Surgery" is a vast room of coffin-shaped, curtained spaces. The anesthetist doesn't believe me when I tell him I don't snore. A surgeon performs one handed pushups just out of my field of vision, much to the approval of her colleagues. I asked if I could keep my gall bladder in a little jar so that I can start my own pickled punk collection starring my ancillary organs. No, we have to send it to pathology to make sure you don't have cancer. Saddened, I wonder if they charge me for that. An EKG is performed and then I knew no more.
I "awake" sore. My wife and mother in law hover around my bed like waiting angels. The guy on the other side of the sheet has the refrain of "Dead and Gone" as his goddamned Text Message notification, and he turns out to be as popular as a junkyard cat in heat.
I hated that guy. Fortunately, I spent most of that day blissfully unconscious.
I eat a handful of Cheerios the next day, and this tells the hospital that I'm well enough to leave. My hand bleeds like a sieve when the nurse removes the thick surgery IV. That was neat. Never seen blood bubble out of me like that.
I am now the proud owner of three extra holes on my stomach and a malformed, double belly button. Can't lift anything heavy for two more weeks. Sad that my mother got to show her gall bladder off to her classmates and I cannot. The huge red welts indicate I'm sensitive to bandage adhesive.
I give the experience an A-.
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