All of This Could Have Been Avoided
One night, when I was 16, I had a very sharp pain in my right side. I tossed and turned for a couple of hours before getting up and knocking on my mom’s bedroom door; a forbidden action. My mother swung the door open and snapped at me.
Then, when I explained my pain, she told me it was just heartburn. She ordered me to drink some milk and go back to bed.
I drank the milk, tossed around my bed for a few more hours, and finally passed out from exhaustion. The next day and a few weeks after that, I felt fine. But then, a couple of months later, the pain was back and I woke my mother in the middle of the night again.
She gave me the same response as the first time, and I once again just passed out from exhaustion. Because it was starting to become a pattern, the next time I felt the pain, I didn’t bother going to my mother and just rode it out.
This continued until I was 18. My parents were out of town one weekend and the pain came back worse than ever before, waking me from a dead sleep.
After hours and hours of utter agony, hurting to move, hurting to lay still, I broke down and called my mother. On the voicemail I left her, I told her that I thought I was dying.
I finally passed out as the sun began to rise. I was woken up by my uncle banging on the front door and he took me to the doctor, who then referred me to an ultrasound and a surgeon.
I was able to get the ultrasound done on the same day but the surgeon didn’t have availability until the end of the week. I didn’t think anything of it as, once again, the pain had disappeared by then.
My mom begrudgingly took me to the appointment with the surgeon, but I’m pretty sure she thought I was faking it since I’d been completely fine all week.
I remember sitting in the office with the surgeon, just chatting while we waited for the nurse to bring him my ultrasound file.
I’ll never forget when she handed it to him. He opened the folder and the smile immediately fell from his face. Surgeon: Did they give you any pain meds when you went to the doctor? Me: No, just some antibiotics.
Why? Surgeon: Nancy, call my 2 pm and tell them we have to reschedule as I’ll be doing emergency surgery. You should have been sent to me last week. I’ll meet you in the ER. So yeah, my gallbladder had apparently been filled with stones since I was 16 and it kept making more for the next two years.
The surgeon said he’d never seen anything like it. All of this could have been avoided if my mother had just listened to me when I first complained to her. alltheyarnthings