I went to bed Sunday night before Cosmo (which is a rarity in this house; I'm usually up until all hours of the night). My parents had just returned from my cousin's wedding in Columbus and my brother and his fam had left earlier in the day. I couldn't get comfortable. I tossed and turned and had a really weird pain in the middle of my chest that wrapped all around to my back. I got out of bed so my tossing and turning didn't disturb Cosmo and laid on the couch for a while. Which seemed to make things worse. So I sat up and watched TV. That didn't help either. At one point, I was on my hands and knees gasping through the pain (please keep in mind KJ was also asleep on the couch and never woke up through any of this). After about an hour of horrific pain that was not going away, I woke up the hubby. I swear to God, I thought I was having a heart attack. The pain was horrific and I couldn't breathe. It felt like a boa constrictor was wrapped around my upper body and slowly but steadily squeezing. I begged him not to wake up my parents and I begged him not to call an ambulance. Just get me to a hospital. Well, since we haven't lived here very long, neither one of us had any idea where the hospital was!
We got in the car, pulled out of the driveway and called 911. The sent us a few miles down the road to the Emergency Center (a stand-alone emergency care center that provides the same emergency medical care that patients can receive at a hospital emergency department, but does not have inpatient beds). They took wonderful care of me. And let me tell you I was in sheer agony. I kept crying to Cosmo "OhMyGod I think I'm going to die. Some thing's really wrong." Cosmo told the ER doctor that I had a pretty high pain threshold and for me to beg to go to the emergency room was an indicator of how bad things were. We got to the emergency center around 1:30 AM, they quickly did an EKG, checked my vitals (blood pressure was through the roof but they think that was because of the intense pain I was in) and started me on some pain meds. After some chest x-rays (which came back fine) and an ultra sound, they determined I had gall stones. I had a couple of choices: be submitted to the hospital for pain management, have the gall bladder removed ASAP, or go home. I was still in a lot of pain so going home was not an option. And neither was laying in a hospital on pain meds without actually doing anything about the stones that aren't going to "pass" like a kidney stone would. So, they transported me to the main hospital around 7 AM, got me a bed and by 1 PM I was in pre-op. Around noon the girls and my parents came to the hospital and KJ took them to the cafeteria for some lunch. I remember being wheeled into surgery at 2 PM and the next thing I remember is waking up in recovery. They went in laproscopically (through the belly button and I have an incision point right between my boobs deep in my cleavage and two incisions on my right side). By 7 PM that night I felt totally fine and by 8 AM the next day (New Year's Eve) I was ready to go home.
T and KJ took my parents to the airport bright and early Tuesday morning and came to the hospital straight from Dulles. Cosmo met us at the hospital and they all helped me get in the car and the girls drove me home, got my prescription for me and picked up plenty of ice pops, broth and jello. Yummy.
As you can imagine, New Year's Eve was kind of lame and I barely got off the couch. T got together with her "little" (she lives in Arlington) and another one of their sorority sisters for New Year's Eve. They had dinner with the Little's family and then went out afterward. T spent the night because there was no way I was going to let her drive on New Year's Eve.
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