Have you had your gallbladder removed?

I pass stones on a regular basis, but they don’t block the duct and make it necessary for removal. Damn my over achiever status.

@cazzie Aren’t you worried one will get stuck and you will have to have emergency surgery?

Yep. But I’ve had two scans and they all show that the stones that are there are very small. When they move, I don’t panic anymore. Hurts like hell, but if it lasts more than 8 hours and I get a fever, then I’ll go to the hospital. I’m not going to panic anymore over a little stone moving. I don’t have anyone to look after my kid or me, so I can’t just check into the hospital.

My husband has. Excruciating pain was his symptom.

They say if it hurts more than labor and it’s on your right near your breast, then it’s your gall bladder. I diagnosed him over the phone when he lived out of the country, so I guess that description is true a lot of the time.

He had the attack twice while he was out of the country. When he was home he went for a sonogram and they saw the stones. Then, a couple of days later he had an attack while home, and he had surgery the next day. He didn’t want to need emergency surgery in Colombia.

Most people are out of the hospital post surgery in a day. My husband was there 4 days. The antibiotic they were giving he was having a bad reaction, which was part of the reason. He had a lot of discomfort afterwards.

I had mine out when I was 19. It felt like a knife or something going straight through me, right at my breastbone.

I was in summer camp with the Army reserves when my gallbladder blew up. I don’t know if it was incompetence or what, but I stayed in agony for days and they refused to admit me or even look at me when I went to the emergency room on the base. I tried to get somebody to take me to a civilian hospital but nobody would and I was too sick to drive. I went to the emergency room four times, the last time in an ambulance.

Eventually they got somebody relatively competent to look at me and then those bozos decided that I really was sick. Next thing I knew I was in a 40 bed ward full of other women. All I remember of that first night was that they kept waking me up and telling me to be quiet. Apparently I was screaming in my sleep.

The nightmare continued for 10 days. At first they were going to take out my gall bladder, but then they decided it was cheaper if they got me well enough to go home and have me pay for it myself. Before I left, somebody told me that when I was admitted I was so dehydrated they gave me a 50–50 chance of survival.

The moral of the story is make sure the person who’s working on you is competent! The Army doctors who would have performed the surgery were on summer camp just like I was- they were surgeons in civilian life too! That was not a comforting thought.

After I got home and had the surgery, I noticed that I could no longer eat a lot of foods, especially greasy ones.

For example if I ate some potato chips, the grease would float to the top of my stomach and it would come back up into my mouth. I didn’t understand what was going on, but it certainly was disgusting.

Since then I have resolved the problem by using digestive enzymes and betaine HCl with my meals.

Post op, the thing to know is to stay away from fatty and greasy foods, or suffer the discomfort of acid reflux, regurgitation—as @snowberry describes above—or diarrhea.

This is why:
The gall bladder stores gall, or bile, which is released into the stomach via the bile duct in order to break down fatty or greasy foods. After your gall bladder is removed, your body will no longer be able to release bile into your stomach and therefore fatty and greasy foods will not be broken down properly. In other words, the fats will not be digested without bile. Fats, if sitting in your stomach too long, become rancid and acidic, thus you risk experiencing acid reflux as in @snowberry‘s case.

Fats and grease are also a lubricant, and if you have a faster transit time than snowberry— meaning that if things move through your digestive tract faster—the undigested fats will move into your small intestine and won’t stay in your stomach long enough to become rancid. But, fats being a lubricant, the fats will “grease the chute” so to speak and increase the transit time even more, causing liquids that are normally absorbed by the large intestine during “packaging”, will not have a chance to be absorbed and will come out the other end as liquid stool. This is diarrhea.

So, be prepared to stay away from greasy and fatty foods, and to take certain enzymes for the rest of your life in order to live more comfortably without these adverse effects.

@Espiritus_Corvus This is how I know I’m going to have an attack. I had to abandon fatty foods for a very long time and I ate NO red meat for years. My gall bladder doesn’t work properly in any case, so any rich food makes me ill.

For me this raises the utterly frivolous question, has anyone ever gotten a gall bladder transplant? ;-p

@Brian1946 There would be no reason to do that. The gallbladder just stores bile, it doesn’t make it. The liver does that.

Then perhaps I should cancel my appendix transplant surgery.

I had my gall bladder removed. I developed pancreatitis. I can eat anything. In saying that, I eat a very healthy diet and rarely eat super fatty foods.

@Earthbound_Misfit You developed pancreatitis from the surgery or before it?

Before the surgery. A gallstone had blocked the pancreatic duct which led to me developing pancreatitis. I was on a drip for a week or so until that settled down and then they removed my gallbladder.