Long time no post once more, as I am balancing the meeting of deadlines with the managing of health Ishews. If you ever find yourself with the sort of gall bladder that must come out, but looking at some delay as the surgeon is not available for a few weeks, look on what has for me been a very bright side: you will lose six kilos and counting.
This is because, as I was warned by a friend who's been through this particular brand of hell -- is there any other ailment that is this painful and frightening and yet this fundamentally non-serious? -- you get to the stage where merely thinking about eating anything with any scrap of fat or oil in it of any kind (and you quickly discover that this includes about 97% of the food in the universe, including my very favourite among them, cheese. Especially cheese) is enough to make your inner vulture start chewing away at your vitals again. Or, in my case, thinking about eating anything at all.
Over these last few weeks I have been reminded repeatedly of that sketch from, I think, Beyond the Fringe about the couple in the English countryside during World War 2. (In a strong West Country accent): 'I'll never forget the day that rationin' was imposed. My wife came out to me in the garden, her face ashen in hue. "Charlie," she said to me, "rationin' has been imposed, and all that that entails." "Never you moind, my dear," I said to 'er, "you put on the kettle, and we'll have a noice steamin' cup o' hot water."'
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20 comments:
Oh you poor bugga! I managed to dislodge my boss's gallstone when I tipped him over in the boat. He was unconscious for a minute or two. For weeks afterwards he kept saying he reckoned I'd given him a good kicking while he was out to it. Finally the 'stone was diagnosed and then he was no longer allowed to eat cheese, vanilla slice or fried chicken. He began thinking he'd have preferred the kicking.
Of course you know the medicos' generalisations about the typical gall bladder patient? It probably does not fit you. Some weight loss is a plus, as it were.
Sarah -- somehow that story rings very true.
Persiflage, oh yes indeed. I am older and less blonde, but as for the third thing ... Well, as I say, -6 kilos = silver lining.
Six kilos!
As my word verification so aptly says, geoses
Get well soon. (Is that a useful thing to say - I hope you know what I mean).
(I happen to have experience at the repat hospital and they did a rather excellent gall bladder procedure on one of my beloveds - could you sneak yourself in there do you think?)
WV: Prestsu
I cannot believe you lost six kilos so prestsu and that you had them to lose at all.
You looked just fine to me. I can tell this from your blog, looking at the photos of your cats staring out the window, and of you when you were 2 years old of course. Those high pants were sure cute.
There's some WV perv, for sure, that reads all these convos.
Now let me go type in this latinate phrase of the day.
Thank goodness it is something not huge in the health scale, but sorry that it is bad in the feeling crappy scale. Hopefully the surgeon will wake up one morning desperate to get back to surgery and get you in early.
Mine blew up two weeks before Christmas a few years ago - after a meal of fish and chips. It was hell, not being able to eat much Christmassy food, although I did rather enjoy the cherries, peaches and raspberries that year. But the surgery, when it happened a few weeks later, was really easy - overnight in hospital and two weeks of taking it easy. My surgeon remarked that the only known use for the gall bladder is the provision of steady income for general surgeons.
I had two gallstone attacks in my early 20s and they were wretched. Never found out why and it's never happened again. So my sympathies - that terrible pain, plus the way it refers into your back and shoulders, ack.
As a grumpy meself, must offer sympathies, a gourmand not able to sample tasty tucker is a little like Beethoven going deaf and not hearing his music. Maybe a bit like comparing Christchurch to Sendai, but much nasty enough.
The other reason I turned up here is, that you were prescient as to FB as with a number of other things recently.
Have just come to the stark discovery of what a perverse thing it can be and urge others concerned with their privacy to contemplate the reality that its systems seem not secure and its failure to provide a decent communication interface with its public actually makes it a menace when you try to protect your privacy.
If you end up in hospital, follow your own warnings PC; do crossword puzzles or read a Mickey Mouse comic, but think of the rape of your privacy that might come some day with FB,
you and your intimate coterie of intelligent readers, all.
I didn't think there was any gall in you to remove.
Look on the bright side. Now you can put that weight back on, eating all the tasty spicy things you couldn't before.
Like toasted eurbred. (Thank you WV)
WV: "hymenese"
!
Case might have twigged on something here.
Gratuitous YouTubery.
Hymenese? Could this be the language implied by the title and import of that great French feminist and (IMHO) mystic Luce Irigaray's, erm, seminal essay 'When Our Lips Speak Together?' Casey will know.
PW, yes, Facebook is dangerous. Or, no -- our use of Facebook can be dangerous.
Nabs, I think that may be one of the nicest things anyone's ever said to me, even in jest. NB I have no intention of putting the weight back on. It helps that apparently there is also something wrong with my liver, which must be coddled (as it were) for the foreseeable. Cheese is to become no more than a happy memory, but that is true by now of so much else in my life that I can probably struggle along with it.
Been having a grumbling in the old GB for a while now, and I must say one of your readers' suggestion about retiring every night after a dessertspoonful of olive oil with lemon juice really has done the trick beautifully.
I am way too sooky and cowardly to have it out ...
WV is a sadist and knows Fyodor cannot possibly speak hymenese. It has also suggested I will sleep with the "peshi" if I try to explain to him the manner of the language, even a bit of it.
and omg who knew WV was cosa nostra. Geez you leave the old country to get away from it, and like, no, horse heads everywhere.
Ah, so Fyodor is Russian mafia? That explains a lot.
"WV is a sadist and knows Fyodor cannot possibly speak hymenese."
One would have to be a pretty cunning linguist to speak Hymenese, Case.
Or an ugly one. No sexist bias, please.
Gall bladder pain and nausea is unspeakably awful. When mine needed to come out a couple of years ago, my surgeon also told me he couldn't do it for a few weeks. The prospect of that length of agony was just unthinkable!
I took myself off to Wakefield emergency, where the original diagnosis had taken place. After a lot of (genuine) groaning, and begging them to find someone else who would take it out, I think they took pity and approached my surgeon again. Maybe it was fear of being sued, if something went seriously wrong.
Evidently, the fact that I was now a current emergency patient provided access to a different list of times, and he took it out three days later. Tiny scars, enormous relief.
All the best!
Philby
Philby -- I had the opposite experience; my surgeon was about to go on hols but offered to squeeze me onto the end of the list for a few days hence, his last before he went. But he said he wasn't very happy about doing a procedure and then leaving any possible complications and follow-up care to someone else, which made me like him so much I decided I wanted him to do it and was prepared to live on broccoli and take my chances on the attacks (less frightening now that I knew exactly what was causing them) for three weeks until he got back.
Lesley, I am really glad to read that. Fantastic. Amazing how something so very very simple could work so beautifully huh?
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