guts

Friday evening we had three great dinner guests and Dad grilled burgers and fries.  I enjoyed 1.5 burgers stacked high on a bun with lettuce, tomato, mustard, salt and pepper.  I have a turbulent relationship with meat.  It does provide some very key nutritional qualities, I don't like the texture and would rather not eat it but have come to the conclusion that sometimes and selectively I'd rather eat a little than deal with deficiencies.  If I only knew.  (foreshadowing)

We had a good time sitting around the fire roasting mallows.  The evening ended with all nine (Zac and Lew were out of town with the choir) of us watching The Phantom of the Opera in the carriage house.

After the movie had finished and our guests had left I decided to lay in bed and read a little.  It was late, nearly 1am, but a Friday evening.  Sent a text to Rachel.  As I'm laying in bed I feel a pain growing below each side of the bottom of my ribs.  It is only slight at first and then it grows.  I stretch.  I breathe.  It gets worse.  Jason is asleep, Sam is awake.  He walks with me into the house.  After a call to his pharmacy major girlfriend Laura he brings me ibuprofen, tums, and hug glass of water.  A frequent sufferer of heartburn Sam has great sympathy.  The pain grows to intensify radiating up to my sternum.  Josiah comes to check on the commotion.  I'm hanging off of Sam at an utter loss to make the pain leave my body.  Mom and Dad come downstairs, wakened from their sleep.  Jason comes in the house.  

It feels like someone has taken the pipe from the board game clue (expect life-sized) and beat my ribs with it.  Mom calls Cousin Doctor and Uncle Doctor.  I know there are two diagnoses we could rule out right away - a heart attack or labor pains.  This wasn't the first time sudden pain had gripped me in the middle of the night.  For the past two months on over half a dozen occasions I would wake with this sharp pain.  Usually, it would subside and I could go back to sleep, assuming it was some sort of muscle discomfort or digestive cramp.  This time was different.  We decided to go to the hospital and get to the bottom of it.  The pains subsided slightly.

On the screen I watched as the ultrasound technician conjured up images of my liver, my kidney, my pancreas, and then of my gallbladder.  I never imagined my first sonogram would be of my gallbladder.  Little pearl-like masses sat inside the body part I had never really given a second thought in my life.  The heart, lungs, brain, and bladder, and various others I give thought to daily but the gallbladder.  I really wasn't even sure what it was for and thought for the longest time it was probably some sort of extension of the normal bladder.  Yes, I have taken anatomy class (twice) but I wasn't really listening to the part about the gallbladder.  But here it was, on the screen, this little part that resembles deflated kick ball or old fashioned water flask.  Somehow it had produced or captured all of these little stones and decided to get stuck and cause me a massive amount of pain.  

For as much is known about the body there is still so much that is not.  Apparently, this part is one of those parts that we can live without.  So after this Tuesday I will find out what it is like to live without my gallbladder - it is being evicted from my gut.  

Unlike my other lesser attacks this one seemed to linger.  Until next Tuesday I am on a limited diet so silence the pain.  One which most definitely does not include meat.  Saturday, after trying to find an open pharmacy, I fell into a Vicodin induced (aided) sleep leaning on Samuel with this song playing.  In an odd way it somehow has just been the theme to this experience.