Stone baby

Life threw me a little curve last Saturday. It started with a sharp pain in my right side. At first I thought it was a muscle cramp but it went zero to sixty as it wrapped around my back and moved up between my shoulders. Two hours later I realized I was in some trouble when I tried to go to the bathroom and almost fainted.

Living in a community has some solid perks. We have a loft-wide email and I sent out a plaintive message: Help. Within five minutes a number of neighbors had responded. One called 911, another agreed to watch Kumo.

In the meantime I had messaged my oncologist, who made it clear that she preferred I come to MGH rather than the local hospital. Once the ambulance arrived they told me they weren’t able to transport me to Boston so two of my neighbors, Ann Marie and Bill, pulled their car up to the entrance of the lofts and then drove me straight to the ER at MGH.

My daughter Jemesii and son Peter were already there when we arrived. And man, did those two advocate for me.

I was in the most serious pain I’ve ever been in (with a spiral fracture of my ankle, a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, and vaginal delivery of a 10 lb 4 oz baby for reference). Jem and Pete manned the call button and pestered the staff until I got my first dose of morphine and a handful of relief. When the ER doctor came to examine me he asked what I had been doing just prior to the pain starting. ‘Eating popcorn’ I said. ‘Buttered?’ he asked. Well, of course.

He then said, ‘I am almost certain this is a gallbladder attack.’

I could live with that. The problem is, none of the diagnostics (labs, CT scan, HIDA scan, x-ray, ultrasound, colonoscopy) were confirmatory.

Fortunately, by Tuesday (day four) the pain and nausea began to ease. That night Peter came to hang out with me and he was reading to me about what it was like to pass a gallstone. It suddenly occurred to me that that morning when bathing (after a little accident secondary to prepping for the colonoscopy) I had found what, in retrospect, was almost most definitively a gallstone.

Well, medical science likes clear hard data so the official diagnosis is no diagnosis. But I haven’t any doubt now what happened. In fact, when describing the pain, I said it was like trying to pass a cherry pit through the head of a needle. And once the morphine kicked in, I joked with my kids that at least labor resulted in something good, like a baby. Not, as it would turn out, a stupid stone.

However, even though I could have done without this particular adventure, it was a formidable bonding experience for me and my adult children. In the face of crisis, we all responded quickly and without hesitation. In the ER my son and daughter took turns holding my hand and only left just before midnight because I shooed them out.

This will not be the last storm we face together, and as a trial run, I’d say we all got an A+. Yea for team Linnea.