Day 12 : On Organs and Such

Well, things didn't go well for my mom today. She's a moron, and she waited way too long to take care of a problem she knew she had. She first started getting pains in her gallbladder at least four months ago, was told that she should schedule a surgery to get it removed...and she didn't. Two more trips to the ER, the last one was this past Wednesday, and still she goes home in the wee hours of the morning rather than waiting to be admitted on first shift, because my sister was supposed to be flying out to California with some friends on Saturday, and she wanted to wait to schedule anything til she was gone. Well, Monday morning she drives herself to the ER, and get this, she left the house FIVE MINUTES AFTER MY DAD LEFT FOR WORK, because she didn't want to bother him about it. !!!

So today my mom spiked a fever of 102, they finally take her into surgery at three pm, and at quarter after five when my dad finally calls me at work to tell me how things went, he tells me that the artery supplying blood to her gallbladder was completely blocked off, there was NO bloodflow to the organ, and it had died. It was dead. It had necrosis and was rotting in her body. So, the simple laproscopic surgery turned into cutting her open some more so they could it out, and then clean out her abdominal cavity to make sure none of the icky infection spread. I went to go visit her late tonight, and they aren't going to let her out of the hospital until her fever is gone and they can make sure she fights off the infection. It was still 102 when I left.

O.M.G.

I think the moral of the story is - something I have known and believed in for quite a long time - when you have PAIN in your body, that's your body telling you that something is very, very wrong. We shouldn't have pain! Ever! The slightest pain is telling you that there is harm, however slight or severe, coming to your body, so DON'T IGNORE IT!

The doctor apparently shook his head at my dad and said "She really should have come in and done this sooner," like he knew that she knew waiting was a bad idea. Ugh, it's so annoying, because I love my mom so much, SO MUCH, and I couldn't bear to lose her. It just pisses me off that she is careless with her health, and I really feel like saying so, like she needs to hear it.

On a lighter note, my mom was so over-the-moon on morphine when I saw her post-op, she was saying crazy things. I asked her if they had talked about when they were going to be getting her up out of bed and she said:

"Oh, I already got up out of bed, I had to pee in the operating room so I got up and went to the bathroom."

My dad and I just gave each other a raised eyebrow look and said "Okaaaaaay."

Later, we were talking about my gallbladder surgery and she said, her voice SO slurred: "They didn't do to me what they did to you."

"What was that?" I asked her.

"They didn't take out my appendix too."

???

I said "Whaaat?"

And she said "Yeah, they took your appendix out, you don't need it anyway they always take it out when you get your gallbladder out, but they don't do that anymore."

Well, if my surgeon snatched my appendix when I wasn't looking, this is the first I heard about it.

I think it was just the morphine talking, so I am going to ask her again tomorrow when she (hopefully) is feeling a little better, but dang. It's making me wonder whether I should call my doctor or not, and ask whether I was robbed of an organ, useless one or not.