I’m celebrating today that’s for sure.  I got a call from the hospital this morning and the lady asked me if I was still interested in having my gall bladder taken out.  Umm..  yeah.  I’ve been suffering gallstone attacks at the rate of 2-3 a week for 3 months.  Only an idiot would want to live like this I told her.

So..  drum roll please…   Friday, August 1st I’ll be going under the knife.

I go in at 8am and I’ll be home the following day unless they screw it up and I have complications.  I have to tell every man and his dog that I have a gastric band and cannot be intubated without dire consequences.  I also have to say that I’m allergic to morphine so I don’t have to spend the following 4 days scratching the invisible bugs that crawl all over my body after getting morphine.

All in all, I’m a happy woman today.  Heck, I even won $21 in the lottery last night.  I bought a ticket on a whim..  it WAS $50 million dollars after all, and sure enough.. I won.  I won $21, not the $50 million.  I have to tell you though, getting a surgery date was better than winning the lottery to me.

I’ll once again be able to go out to dinner and not have to drink water because there’s nothing on the menu that’s fat free.  I’ll be able to go to parties and have friends over without people feeling sorry for me.  Yay !!

You can see that it doesn’t take too much to make me happy.

One doctor says don’t lose any more weight because you’ve lost too much weight too fast.  The next doctor says you’ve got gallstones and he doesn’t want you to eat any fat, no milk, cheese or butter and if you get a flare-up of symptoms, drink water for a couple of days.  Sound confusing?  It is.

There is no way I can not lose weight if I can’t eat.  I have to be really careful not to alert my gall bladder so it doesn’t toss the stones in the duct and that means eating very little bland food throughout the day.  No regular meals.  Not even regular sized lapband meals which is about a cup or cup and a half of food.

I did think that maybe I should find some fat free cake or fat free ice cream or maybe even some fat free brownie.  Only to keep from losing too much weight, of course..  not for any other reason.  Then I realized that maybe my sweet tooth was talking for me and decided that I’d just keep losing a bit at a time.  I’m not losing 5 pounds a week like I was.  Less than a pound a week is probably ok, right?

I have no idea what life will be like once I have the gall bladder out.  I have about 4 3/4 months to wait, never knowing what day the surgery might be.  Apparently the way it works is that I’ll get a letter telling me to arrive at the hospital on a specific date and then it will happen.  Fingers crossed.  The law in New Zealand is that I cannot be on the waiting list for surgery for more than  6 months.  I keep ticking the days off on my calendar.

Just when I thought I was finished grieving for all the food I used to eat, it got worse.  I had another gallstone attack when Mr. GT’s parents were visiting so I lost a day with the pain and then another day getting over the after-affects of the pain killers.  So I thought I’d be clever and only have fresh squeezed vegetable and fruit juice for a few days to see if that would quiet things down.  It would also give me a chance to reset my food intake because I’d been eating more than usual while “the olds” were here.

Well, who would have thought that only juice could bring on another attack?  Certainly not me. So when the first pangs of discomfort started I didn’t take any pain killers because I had only had juice, I couldn’t possibly be having another gallstone attack!  Turns out that when the gall bladder is really inflamed, most anything can set it off – even juice.

The doctor who cared for me at the hospital said that waiting for the real pain to set in made relieving it much more difficult.  After the 4th try of a different drug, I was pain free but not nausea free.  It took 36 hours to be able to walk without feeling I was going to adore the porcelain god any moment.

So now the bland diet is clear broth and not much else for another 24-36 hours and then slowly introduce food.  Now, if I’m not supposed to lose any more weight until my liver is better, how can I keep the weight I’ve got eating nothing but clear broth?  Maybe I can find some fattening broth. 

Well, for all of you who’ve been waiting to hear what happened..   it’s been a pain in the ass, that’s what.  After being told to be careful what I ate, I left the hospital and then decided to go touring with my daughter while she was visiting from Florida.   We had a great time.

We went to Rotorua to see the boiling mud, geysers and the Maori villages.  We ate food cooked in a hangi and we shopped til we dropped.  It was great girly fun.  Then we went caving in Waitomo to see the glow worms.  It sounds wonderful but they’re really maggots that stick to the walls and ceilings of the caves and there’s something in their poo that is luminescent.  So glow worms it is because if they said, “come see our brightly colored, shit covered maggots,” I wouldn’t have gone.

Then we headed to Auckland and took the ferry to Devonport and browsed the trendy shops and galleries and had a lovely lunch at a sidewalk cafe.  We had a terrific time.

We were going home the next morning so we took the car back to the rental agency and I said, “why not eat at the airport and then get the shuttle to the hotel?”

This was not a good idea.  Even though I had vegetarian quiche, I had another gallstone attack and I was in a lot of pain.  After a couple of hours of squirming on the bed, I decided I needed something and called the ambulance.  There’s nothing quite like leaving a hotel in an ambulance.  Ugh..

I was in the emergency room at the hospital for a few hours and a doctor came to me and said they wanted to admit me and take out the gall bladder because it was obvious it wasn’t getting any better and this would continue to happen.  I was elated!  Not that I was in Auckland and having it done so far from home, but that it was going to finally happen.  I got to my room and they sent someone else to take even more blood and was told “nothing by mouth” until the surgery because they thought there was some pancreas problems too.  So drips in.

Next day – Thursday..  no surgery.

Next day – Friday.  Get all ready for surgery and wait.  And wait.  At 3pm a nurse comes in and says, “operation has been cancelled because the senior doctor thinks you might have a stone in your bile duct and that would be dangerous if you had surgery, so you’re scheduled for an MRI and then they’ll go down your mouth with a light to get out the stone before surgery.”

Ugh..

Later the doctor comes in and says that nothing will be done over the weekend but the MRI will happen on Monday.  I’m thinking.. sure it will, nothing happens in the hospital like they say it will.

Long boring weekend doing absolutely nothing.

Monday comes and guess what?  No MRI.. too busy down there I’m told.

Next day – Tuesday.  I have the MRI at 10am and at 3pm I’m told there are no stones in the duct and the surgery will be tomorrow morning for sure.

Next Day – Wednesday.  Doctor arrives at 8am and says, “This is a public hospital (socialized medicine) and I’m going to discharge you to go home and go on the waiting list at your local hospital (2 hours away from home) because there’s a junior doctors strike starting today and your surgery is elective and we’re not doing any elective surgery at this time.”

What???   Elective??  Well, yes, it turns out that in New Zealand, anything that doesn’t prevent imminent death is considered elective.  Since my problem is only painful, it’s not necessary for it to come out anytime soon.

So, in today’s mail I get my discharge papers from the hospital and it says something totally different than what I understood the doctor to tell me before I left.  The discharge says I can stay in the hospital and wait for surgery OR go home.  That’s not the impression I got at all.  I was taking up a much needed bed, my surgery was elective and I was at the bottom of the list, it could take a very long time to get on the schedule and I’d be better off waiting for Whangarei Hospital.  I certainly would have chosen to wait for surgery.  Now I am on a waiting list that could take years before surgery and in all that time, it’s gonna be lean chicken and vegetables for me.  No butter, beef – including hamburgers, no bacon, no sausages, no hot dogs, no milk, no cheese, no sour cream, no ice cream, no pastries, no cakes, no cookies – the list goes on but basically it’s no anything that tastes good.

Frustrated but feeling ok.