The Gallbastard

Well, it's been a while since I've posted a "what's going on in my life" sort of thing on here, but that's probably because it's been a while since there's been much going on in my life that would really lend itself to a blog post ("I think this girl might like me but I'm not sure if I'm just reading too much into things" and "some people at work suck" can only really be posted so many times before people probably get sick of reading them, and in the case of the work thing I'd honestly rather just forget those people exist when I'm not around them so writing about them here would be a bit counterproductive. XD)

This past month, though, has been a bit more eventful than usual.  And mostly in a bad way.  Starting shortly after my birthday (yeah, I'm 30 now, though I still look 20ish because apparently I stopped aging 10 years ago XD), I started getting sick on and off, stomach pain and sometimes even vomiting to start with.  Stomach pain one day, then it got better, then it came back even worse during my lunch break at work another day, which lead to me having to go home early (and also to me throwing up in the parking lot... and again several more times that night at my apartment.)  Over the next few days there was more stomach pain, and some new symptoms like chills/fever that had not been present before.  I ended up lying around the house watching random Youtube videos (mostly some guy playing through Pokémon ROM hacks), drinking tiny amounts of ginger ale at a time and occasionally trying to eat if I thought I might be able to keep something down.  Usually, stuff stayed down -- there was no nauseated feeling of "oh crap I'm gonna throw up" hovering over me, and when that did happen it was really sudden and not really preceded by the usual "barfy" feeling at all.  Stomach pain started to go away somewhat.  So I figured I'd try to go to work... yeah, that did not go well.  Got the chills, started shivering uncontrollably, and ended up leaving work after half an hour (shortly after throwing up back at the lockers.)  Later that night I threw up again and it was green.  And insanely acidic, like way beyond the point of normal barf.  Got in touch with my mom and we ended up going to the urgent care place in Staunton the next day, after calling several hospitals and such and finding they were all closed for the weekend.  Some checking of various things later, they thought it could be my appendix and recommended going to the hospital right away.  Nearest one was Augusta, so we went over there (after some... bizarre inability to follow directions on my mom's part... she seriously drove right by the street we were supposed to turn onto, even though she recognized the name as the one we were supposed to turn onto, because it "didn't seem like it'd been 3 miles yet."  Ugh >_<), and I ended up being put on an IV due to the fact that I was pretty dehydrated at this point.  This was actually not as weird as I was expecting; the process of having it put in was no worse than a minor shot and it just felt somewhat cold as the fluids started to go in.  And then I felt much better afterward, as the dehydration was apparently pretty bad at that point.  Speaking of things being pretty bad, I had a fever in the 102-103 range... yeah, apparently I was pretty sick a couple weeks ago.

Anyway... they did more tests -- blood, CT, and even an ultrasound on my stomach area -- and determined that while my appendix was perfectly normal (and my kidneys and liver were also in great shape), a certain other internal organ had gone bad...

...yep, it was my gallbladder, which was apparently severely inflamed on one side and full of stones.  It looks like that's been what has been causing my occasional "stomach pain, throw up, stomach hurts the rest of the night and then it goes away for a while" sickness that has been happening on and off (but mostly off) for the past few years, starting while I was in SVU.  I stayed in the hospital that night, with IV fluids keeping me hydrated (and anti-nausea and pain meds also being pumped into me that way along the way), and the next morning they wheeled me into the operating room for the surgery.

Which thankfully I don't remember anything of.  I was knocked out so thoroughly that I don't even remember being wheeled into the operating room in the first place -- my memory jumps from hanging out in the waiting room before surgery to being back in my usual hospital room several hours afterward, with all kinds of weird bandages on my stomach that weren't there before.  The surgery apparently took 3 hours (though they were able to do it laproscopically -- that's probably spelled wrong -- rather than having to make a bigger incision), thanks to how badly inflamed and full of stones the Gallbastard was at this point.  I had a drain hole in my side with a little plastic tube leading to this grenade-looking thing, which would slowly fill up with gross blood gunk over time (this stopped before I left the hospital, thankfully, and after another couple days I was able to take the padding and tape off of that spot where it had been without too much trouble, and no further oozing.)  I ended up staying in the hospital for another two nights -- Sunday and Monday -- during which I found that I could actually eat again without getting sick and throwing it back up.  Also watched a lot of random old TV shows... I remember bits of Walker: Texas Ranger, Everybody Loves Raymond, Friends, and so on (and some not-so-old shows too; there was a crime type show called Flashpoint that I don't think I'd ever stumbled across before), and ended up following the news a bit as they covered the shooting in Orlando.  And since they moved my IV to my right arm, I ended up drawing left-handed a bit.  Here's a couple of those pages...

Not as much of a reversion to elementary-school level as I had expected.

If the eyes of a mustache are upon you...
...lay off the pain meds, because mustaches don't have eyes. XD

It was a little odd how the stay in the hospital started to seem somewhat vacation-like after the surgery happened -- I mean, things hurt in my stomach area (a lot, especially when I tried to get up out of bed or lay back down), but with the dehydration gone and me able to eat and sleep at least semi-normally again it was actually kinda nice.  Of course, looking back I really couldn't sleep even remotely close to normally -- I was on the pain meds, and had to lay on my back instead of my usual position on my stomach since the surgery had been so recent and it probably would've hurt a lot to try and lay face-down -- but compared to having to get up in the middle of the night to throw up (or not getting much sleep at all due to stomach pain) it was an improvement.

Speaking of those pain meds... the side-effects of the one they gave me (I believe it was called Percocet or something like that, though I'm pretty sure that's just one of several brand names for oxycodone or something along those lines) were really, really weird.  I didn't hallucinate like I've heard some other people mentioning, but I did see things whenever I closed my eyes.  It's hard to describe now that I'm not really on the pills anymore (I'll take a single pill before bed now, but that's it -- none during the day, and never two at a time like they were giving me at the hospital!), but basically, instead of the usual blackness with occasional colored spots where lights were before you closed your eyes, I would see all kinds of random stuff whenever I closed my eyes.  Text scrolling in front of me, sometimes stuff I could read fragments of (the word "Ypsilanti" came up, and apparently that's a name? I don't recall ever hearing it before seeing it in my weird closed-eye-hallucinations...) and other times stuff I couldn't catch anything of at all -- like it was in a foreign language, or just a little too far away to see clearly.  Sometimes images, usually moving, instead... scenes of some grayish-looking city mostly, but there were different things every now and then.  And sometimes those would start to fade into red, which made me want to open my eyes again because this freaked me out, for some reason I was afraid that if the red became too bright something bad would happen or something.  I'm not really sure, I was on drugs at the time. XD  This continued all the way up through my ride home from the hospital on Tuesday -- I would close my eyes and see a different road, rather than the one we were currently driving on, and sometimes it would start to fade to red like I'd previously mentioned.  These other roads usually had some neat stone construction type stuff on the side, sort of reminding me of bridges and things you'd see in a historic area.  I think sometimes there were even cobblestone-ish roads.

But yeah... the Tuesday after the surgery I finally headed home.  Well, "home" -- I went to Mom's house in the middle of nowhere, since I wasn't really in any shape to be taking care of myself and living alone at that point.  There was a good bit of pain whenever I tried to stand up from sitting (or especially lying down), getting out of bed was a struggle, that sort of thing.  Eating was no problem, though I've been shying away from greasy/fried and spicy stuff so far and trying to stick to smaller amounts of food in one sitting than I would normally eat (though I found out today that eating a whole sub works just fine so long as I don't order any appetizers or anything with it, so I figure that when it comes to anything that's not fried/greasy/spicy I should be able to eat normally.)  After a while of recovering, I've finally moved back into my apartment (earlier today, actually!) since the pain is nearly gone and things like sitting, standing, and even bending over to pick things up aren't hard to do at all anymore.  I'm getting a lot better sleep lately, and have even started having dreams again, which I'm guessing is a good sign since you need to get to a certain level of deep sleep to have dreams at all.  Several weird ones in the past few days -- one involving me pushing Ruth around in a shopping cart (and random rhododendron leaves appearing out of nowhere), another one where I was riding a bicycle (...I don't actually know how!), and one involving people I knew from high school and a house with some weird giant obstacle-course thing built in (the kitchen was in the same room as this, oddly enough.)

So... yeah.  In case anyone was wondering what the heck's been up with me lately... well, the Gallbastard decided to attack and I've been recovering. XD

I figure I will be well enough to go back to work soon, though now the question is not so much "do I feel like going back" as "will they actually get around to filling out the paperwork I need to have done before I can go back?"... which is a real pain.  I faxed one set of forms to the hospital on Monday but haven't heard back from them yet, so it looks like they'll be taking a week or more to get that done.  I'll probably try to fax the "return to work" form to them on Monday after I fill out my part of that; unfortunately wasn't able to do that until now because it asks for an "estimated return-to-work date" and I really had no idea until I was already starting to feel a lot better.  And yet they expect it to be sent to the company that handles Wal-Mart's leave of absence stuff three days ahead of that return-to-work date... pretty much everything related to the paperwork here is really irritating and I'll be glad when I'm finally done with it and stuff can just go back to normal.

Until then, I guess I'll be finishing up my recovery here in Buena Vista.  Not sure when going back to work again will happen, but I do have a follow-up appointment with the doctor on Thursday so hopefully it won't be much longer after that.