Some of you may know that I haven't felt like my normal self since before I was pregnant with Grady. So it has been more than a year!!! I was so sick during the first half of my pregnancy and then I swelled to twice my size the second half. I had an emergency c-section with Grady, and I thought that was going to be the end of my health issues. Boy was I wrong!! About 3 weeks after Grady arrived I started having horrible pain in my chest and ribs. This pain led to two 911 calls, the firemen visiting my house twice, two trips to the ER, a suspected blood clot in my lung which landed me in the hospital for 3 days, and many visits to many doctors. Finally, the beginning of August I went to see a new doctor, Dr. Laufer, and he thought I might have gallstones. One ultrasound later, it was confirmed that I had multiple stones in my gallbladder. So off I went to see Dr. Chen, my surgeon, and he decided it was best to remove my gallbladder. September 3rd I went in for laproscopic surgery at 2:00 p.m. and was home in my bed by 4:30 p.m. I was told by many people that I would be back on my feet within 2-3 days. Of course, with my luck, that didn't happen. A week after my surgery I was still in terrible pain and unable to care for my sweet baby by myself. So off to Snowflake I went so my mom could take care of Grady and me. Well, September 12th rolls around and I am in so much pain and pale as a ghost my mom calls Dr. Chen and he advises me to go immediately to the ER to get an abdominal scan. I am not a huge fan of the hospital in Show Low so I opted to go see Dr. Paxman, a family doctor. He then sends me to get a CT Scan which later shows I have two huge pockets of fluid inside my tummy right around where my gallbladder used to be. Back to the valley we go. Dr. Chen discovered that I have an extra bile duct (which is a birth defect and only 1 in every 300 people have), and will be needing drains inserted into my tummy and a stint placed inside my main bile duct. So after both of these procedures this is what I looked like in the hospital...
The yummy looking stuff in the drainage bag is bile from my liver mixed in with a little bit of blood. Lovely huh? After both procedures were done I started to feel much better. Two days after I left the hospital my little bulb drain was taken out. So now I just have the drainage bag, which is still draining tons of stuff which you can see by this picture...
Because there is still so much drainage I may have to undergo yet another procedure. Hopefully this next one will do the trick and fix me so I can feel like a human being again!!! I will keep you posted...keep your fingers crossed!!!
