Cholecystectomy | No More Gallbladder For Kristina...

A little over nine years after having my own, my sister had a cholecystectomy (The surgical removal of the gallbladder) yesterday and like me, she had it done laparoscopically (A surgical technique in which operations are performed far from their location through small incisions elsewhere in the body) -- Which is basically how everyone has it done nowadays, unless the surgeon runs into a problem and then you end up getting sliced open.

For those of you that are unaware of what causes gallbladder problems, they are "usually caused by the presence of gallstones which are small hard masses consisting primarily of cholesterol and bile salts that form in the gallbladder or in the bile duct. And can block the flow of bile out of the gallbladder, causing it to swell and resulting in sharp abdominal pain, vomiting, indigestion and, occasionally, fever" according to the Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons' site.

Both my sister and I suffered from the sharp abdominal pains, which were horrific and landed us each in an emergency room. But unlike me, my sister did not have an inflamed gallbladder so she got to schedule her surgery (Which she scheduled around a trip to Cancun that she went on with her boyfriend last week). While I ended up having emergency surgery two days after my twenty-first birthday. But yeah...

So because she had the surgery yesterday, I took the day off and spent almost all of it with her and our parents in the hospital (Where I cracked very inappropriate jokes to make her laugh because I could tell that she was super nervous) and at their house once she was discharged.

In terms of the actual surgical procedure, it went extremely well. She had no complications and according to both the surgeon and anesthesiologist "It was a textbook case that couldn't have gone any better..." and because of that she was as in and out of the hospital as quickly as one could be after having an organ removed. And she is currently at home relaxing and recovering.

So that is how I spent my Thursday. I Snapchatted throughout the course of the time we were at the hospital but I forgot to save the video or I would have shared it with all of you because it was funny. Oh well...

Are any of you members of the gallbladderless club? Lemme know.

Mini Life Update...

I know I haven't written anything in a while (My last post was pre-scheduled, so I really haven't sat down and posted in a bit) and that's because my life has been crazy, and not necessarily in a good way. I'm not gonna go into great detail about everything right now but I promise towards the end of next week I will be posting tons of stuff. For now here is the bullet point version of various things I've had to deal with for the past few weeks...

• My mom spent a few days in the hospital
• We went to Virginia for Christmas & got stuck there longer than planned
• I got sick (Cough, fever and all that other good stuff)
• On New Year's Day I cut my finger open (left pointer), went to the ER and got stitches
• Went back to work for a weird work day today

So yeah... As you all can probably guess the main reason I can't really blog at the moment is the having stitches thing. It's hard to type with my finger all dressed in a splint and it honestly hurts a bit to type. So once I get the stitches out I promise I will be back in full force.

Thank you guys for being so awesome. I hope you all had a great holiday season & New Years! I'll talk to you soon!

Causing Chaos In The ER...

I caught Ricardo messing with my mom's IV

* My mom was awake, she put Ricardo there and let me take the picture. I was gonna put him elsewhere.

Evening In The Emergency Room...

So I thought I had it bad the other day spending the afternoon at the urgent care clinic with Erin, well today I spent my evening in the emergency room because my mother passed out at work (Thankfully she works in a hospital, so she didn't have to go far).

Around 4:10pm my mother calls and asks to speak to my father, so I put him on and she apparently told him she passed out while she was at work, was in the emergency room and need him to pick her up because she couldn't drive herself home. We both hop in my car and drive over to the hospital to find my mom hooked up to a bunch of machines in the ER.

We start talking to her and find out that they want to do a cardiac catheterization on her because we have a family history of heart problems, but she refused to do it until we got there. So once we got there I found her nurse and they sent her up for the procedure. While she was being wheeled up we found out she passed out at 11:00am and was in the ER like all day (We were not happy when we found out).

As she was having all of this done my father and I were stuck waiting in a visitors lounge forever. After what seemed like forever and a year the doctor that did the catheterization came to tell us that it was all good, but she had to lay down for three hours for whatever reason (I remember him mumbling something about where they put the catheter in) and she needed an MRI.

To make a long story short, she was still in recovery all drugged up and hadn't her MRI so the nurses told us they were going to keep her over night because they weren't sure when she'd have it and she still needed to be in bed because of the other procedure. So my mom is still in the hospital.

Hopefully they get the MRI done tonight, it's fine and we can just pick her up in the morning. I'll obviously write about what happens when I know what is going on.

Sent Home From Work...

I wrote about my trip to the emergency room, but I failed to mention that I did indeed try to go to work this morning and after five minutes of listening to me cough my Department Head told me to go home because she didn't wanna hear me coughing all day -- It was apparently making her uncomfortable. It was a really big deal for her to send me home because she is very much so a suck it up and stay at work kinda person. I was glad to go home and nap on the couch. It was good for me.

Trip To The Emergency Room...

Today I had enough with this terrible cough, so I called my doctor to try to get her to call in a prescription for a cough suppressant to the pharmacy for me. Instead of doing that she talked me into going to the local emergency room to have a chest x-ray to make sure that I don't have pneumonia. So my mother and I headed over to the local hospital where they took forever and a day to deal with me.

Stupid Shit The Hospital Staff Did While I Was There:

• Didn't give me the option not to pee in a cup after I told them I wasn't pregnant. Yes, apparently you can refuse to pee in the cup. My mother just told me today that you can (She works in a hospital).
• Took an hour to get me into the x-ray room. The x-rays took less than 5 minutes.
• Let a woman (Who obviously needed a psych consult) discuss the fact that she believed that she was being raped in her sleep by her cousin landlord person within earshot of other patients. She was literately sitting two seats away from me and all they did was block her in with a curtain. The woman was talking about being raped in her sleep, feeling that her vagina and anus had been penetrated when she woke up, how her hair was being cut in her sleep, etc. It was crazy. My mom had to hit me from laughing because it was really ridiculous. It actually made me miss the days in college when I ended up at Binghamton General Hospital sitting next to people who were brought in by the police and handcuffed to the chairs.
• My mother went up to the ER desk and torn into the woman there about my x-rays being read and the woman told her that they weren't developed after an hour of taking them. My mother pointed out to the woman that she herself works in a hospital and that it doesn't take that long to develop x-rays. After causing the woman to stutter, my mother informed her that if we didn't see a doctor in 10 minutes that we'd be leaving and that there was no way in hell we'd be paying the ER bill when they sent it.
  
• My mother confronted the first resident (Some Asian doctor) that walked past us about my x-rays being read and he was so flustered that he didn't come back to say anything to us. This cause my mother and I to bitch out the ER doctor that eventually came up to me with another resident about the "Asian" doctor -- The ER doctor got all defensive because he just walked in.
• Before the ER doctor had a chance to be defensive, he came up to me talking about when the results of my blood work came back. Seeing as I had no blood work taken my mother and I both went off about how no blood work was taken and that they could have taken it anytime in the hour and a half after they took my x-rays but instead they ignored me.
  
• A nurse asked me who I was being helped by around the two and a half hour mark and I told her that no one there was helping me and that the staff was completely useless. I scared her away, she didn't come back.
  
• A different nurse came up to me after sitting around for almost three hours and told me they wanted to take blood to make sure I didn't have Pertussis (Whooping cough). This is the point where I told them I was done and wanted to be discharged because they sucked.

So, it took me three hours, a bunch of bullshit and bitching out five hospital staff members to get a bottle of cough syrup with codeine. I should have just called Erin and stole half of her bottle. That would have taken me all of five minutes.

Weekend Recap...

Friday night was the Library's holiday party. As soon as I punched out at 5:00pm I grabbed Lenni and we headed over to the restaurant where the party was being held to have "apéritifs" before hand with a couple of other people. My sister showed up a half an hour after we go there to join us and by 6:00pm everyone that was coming was there. I thankfully got to sit at the cool kids table this year (the last time I went to a holiday party Justin and I somehow ended up at the reject table with one of my friends). My table had fun, the food was alright and there was unlimited wine and beer, so it was a good evening.

Saturday I worked from 9:00am to 4:30pm with "Sarah" and the Department Head. At some point in the day I hurt my back, which ruined the rest of my weekend.

Today I was in so much pain that Justin had to take me to the local emergency room. I had x-rays taken and I sat around for hours for them to tell me it was muscular and that I needed to rest for a couple of days (I have a doctors note stating that I can't go to work until Wednesday). I did get a shot of something in the arm and a Vicodin at the hospital, plus prescriptions for 600mg Motrin, muscle relaxers and some emergency Vicodin. The meds have kicked in so I'm feeling a lot better now, but I'm sleepy.