A Week at the Hospital

It seems as time goes on my visits to the hospital increase. I made it to 2020 without ever visiting the ER. And now I made it to 2025 without being admitted to the hospital for an overnight stay.

It all started around 2AM Tuesday morning. For the past 16 years, every few years I’d get a pain in my stomach area, usually after a big meal. They were very uncomfortable and usually included nausea and kept me up all night. But they were gone by the next morning. A few times I went to my primary care doctor afterwards but nothing was ever found and it was passed off as indigestion.

This time I was in Seattle and the pain was extreme and didn’t go away overnight as usual. I headed to the ER around 10AM after a rough night of not sleeping and throwing up. Normal pain meds didn’t help.

I ended up at St. Anne’s in Burien, WA and immediately got into the ER where they took a bunch of blood and had me sit in the waiting room for the results. That took awhile. After several hours I got taken back to an ER room and changed into the hospital gown for further tests. My blood tests showed a severe infection and they wanted to do a CT scan. That was fun – the contrast injection makes your blood feel like it’s on fire.

At this point the doctor told me they saw something – without further explanation – and an ultrasound was scheduled. An ultrasound tech immediately showed up and performed the scan without comment.

By this point I’m getting a bit worried. It was around 6PM and the pain was getting to be too much. The nurse showed up and I explained I had been in extreme pain since about 2AM and I couldn’t take it anymore. She said they were going to admit me for emergency surgery and got me on morphine.

At this point I called Julie, who was at our farm in Missouri, told her the issue and she got a flight out for the next morning, since Kansas City International doesn’t have any overnight flights anywhere, especially to Seattle.

The night was a blur. I got into a room and it was decided to wait until morning for the surgery. I was finally informed the problem is my gallbladder; I had a large gall stone stuck in the bile duct and it had become infected and it all needed to be removed ASAP. I had the luck to pick a hospital that just happened to have a Cholecystectomy (gallbladder removal) specialty practice.

Julie arrived at the hospital about five minutes before they wheeled me out for the surgery.

The surgery went well. Apparently they use robots for this sort of work nowadays and instead of one big incision in my abdomen I have five small ones that make recovery faster and easier.

I was in the hospital for 5 days. About half of that was due to my potassium levels being dangerously low. Apparently unrelated to anything else, that’s still a mystery. They got me up to normal with some potassium supplements and wanted me to check in with my primary care doctor once I got out.

After the post-op checkup we got approval for me to travel back to the farm from Seattle to recover. Once we got back I saw my primary care doctor and he checked my potassium and all was back to normal so he had no concerns.

It was quite the adventure, but I’m glad it’s over. And I’m very happy the occasional late-night pain I’ve been having for the past 16 years is something I won’t have to deal with again.