Spent the night at the emergency room, just got home about a half hour ago. Unfortunately I did not bring mom home with me. She will be staying in the hospital for a couple of days. She started having some serious pain yesterday evening and it wasn’t going away with the medication she has so we decided to go to the ER. They believe that her gall bladder is infected based on a CT scan, ultrasound and blood work. The ER doctor consulted the surgeon and the surgeon wants to get a sample of the fluid around the gall bladder for testing before deciding if her gall bladder needs to be removed. She will have the fluid draw done sometime this morning. My guess is that she will have surgery either later today or tomorrow. Gall bladder removal is a relatively routine procedure for most people these days and hopefully that will be true for my mother as well. There is always risks associated with surgery though.
I had a difficult time leaving her this morning, but since I haven’t slept in 24 hours I would be of little use to her there at the hospital, so I am going to try to get some sleep. Later in the morning I will go to the gym to let people there know that she won’t be there today and that she is really bummed that she doesn’t get to go to the gym today.
The pain came on as she was reaching to turn on the light on the end table next to the couch. It was a further reach than she expected and she ended up having to lean against the arm of the couch. We were hoping it was going to be something simple like a pulled muscle or a cracked rib, but I was worried it would be something more like a bruised liver which wouldn’t be such a good thing. We were joking about it being a kidney stone and then I realized maybe it is a gall stone problem. In a recent blog post I talked about her blood working showing a high level of ALP (alkaline phosphatase) and remembered that when I was reading about ALP that one of the causes of an elevated ALP is bile ducts blocked by gall stones. So now things are starting to make sense and the puzzle pieces are fitting together.
Anyway, that is the current situation. I will provide updates when I know more.