Northern Idaho News

23 Surgical Staples Later

The Agony and the Cholecystecomy or Where’s My Gizzard?

By Joan Opyr, 12-09-05

Oh the humanity.

Wow. What a pain in the abdomen a gallbladder is. Like its brother, the appendix, the gallbladder is a semi-vestigial organ – it helps to “saponify" the fat we eat and thus aids in digestion, but you can live quite well without it. You just have to watch what you eat. Too much fat, too much dairy, and you might find yourself suffering from a thing called “dumping syndrome." Yes, dumping syndrome. Don’t ask; you don’t want to know.

Most gallbladders these days are removed laparoscopically. The surgeon pokes three one-inch holes in your abdomen, inserts an endoscope in one, uses the other to pump you full of gas, and he or she then performs the clamping and removal through the third hole. It’s outpatient surgery, and you’re up and about in no time.

My gallbladder was different. My gallbladder was an ugly sucker. It wasn’t just full of stones and sludge; it was infected. It was gross. It refused to be evicted from its nice warm home, nestled snugly behind my liver. My gallbladder was also tricky to remove because of a genetic anomaly. My cystic duct, which should only have been about half an inch long and run in a straight line from Old Gally to the extrahepatic bile duct, was instead nearly four inches long and kinked and curved like San Francisco’s Lombard Street.

For the technical reader – or any Jack the Gallbladder Rippers out there – here’s how the digestive system works. The extrahepatic bile duct runs from the liver to the small intestine. (Extrahepatic means outside the liver.) The cystic duct runs from the gallbladder to the extrahepatic bile duct, connecting about halfway down. So, the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone, the hip bone . . . the hip bone has nothing to do with any of this. Unfortunately, the gallbladder does not appear in popular song form. I suspect that’s because while the skeleton is kind of interesting, kind of sexy in a Halloween sort of way, none of us really want to know what our guts are up to. We just want to eat our pizza and our ice cream and our greasy burgers and fries without afterwards requiring a morphine drip.

If you get a gallstone in your cystic duct, you will beg someone to shoot you. In my experience, there is no pain like it – not food poisoning, not wisdom tooth extraction, not breaking your toe, not taking a 75 mile-per-hour fast-pitch softball to the face, and not getting your index finger nearly bitten off by a Rottweiler cross. I’m not in a position to compare gallbladder pain to childbirth because I’m that lucky kind of lesbian mother whose partner did all the heavy lifting. I can report, however, that said partner has also had her gallbladder removed, and she assures me that she would rather have given birth to a Sumo wrestler than to have had the post-fudge turtle brownie with gallbladder attack that led to her own cholecystectomy. There just isn’t enough Demerol in the world when a gallstone is making its wicked way through the cystic duct to the extrahepatic duct and on to your small intestine. It feels like you’re trying to pass a pumpkin through your navel.

I was glad to wave goodbye to my gallbladder. I may also, in the process, have waved goodbye to pizza, ice cream, cheese and butter, but I don’t care. No more Percoset; no more grinding pain; no more waiting for the next gallstone to drop. Was it worth the eight-inch incision, 23 staples, and six days flat on my back in one of those hospital Craftmatic adjustable beds? You bet! It was also worth the clear liquids only diet, having to pee into a “urine hat," the wind whistling up my backless gown, and a team of doctors and nurses with an embarrassing and perpetual interest in my bowel tones. If I am never again asked by a serious-faced concerned medical professional whether or not the patient has pooped today, I will die happy. The answer to that question has been no one’s business but my own since I was a toddler, and frankly, I like it that way. I like it just fine.

I’m glad to be out of the hospital. I am glad to be on the mend. I just wish I could have convinced my surgeon to throw in an appendectomy and a tummy tuck – a little preventive maintenance mixed with a small dose of vanity. Why not? When Jiffy Lube changes my oil, they also check the air filter and the windshield wipers. I say as long as the surgeon had the hood up anyway, why not make a few extra improvements?

I don’t want to be Michael Jackson, but I sure wouldn’t mind being Cher.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.