Goodbye Gallbladder!

We had quite the eventful week. Tuesday Garlan had been sick all day with what we thought was the stomach flu. The pain continued to get worse and seemed to be in the upper right portion of his abdomen. Not typical signs of stomach flu or food poisoning - more like appendix or gallbladder. So around 10 pm I took him in to the ER to be checked out. The whole way he kept saying how stupid he would feel if it was just stomach flu. Neither of us wanted it to be something bad but we didn't want to drop $50 for nothing.

Luckily going to my hospital is like going to be with family. The doctor was great and agreed right away that it wasn't just the stomach flu. They did a CT scan which showed an enlarged gallbladder. He talked with the surgeon and they decided to keep him overnight and then did an ultrasound the next morning to find he was chuck full of gallstones. Dr Francis removed his gallbladder a couple hours later! It was a bad enough gallbladder and so full of stones that they decided to keep him overnight for more IV antibiotics. So instead of watching BYU vs SDSU we had to listen to it on the laptop. He was not too happy about it and kept asking if we could leave for two hours and come back. haha.

The other interesting twist to all of this is that in October we had blood work done for life insurance and he was denied because his liver enzymes were all high. The crazy thing was that he didn't have any symptoms and the ultrasound we did in November appeared normal. We've been rechecking his blood work each month and the enzymes weren't coming down. Last week we did another batch of labs more specific to Hepatitis and other liver diseases. The results just happened to come back the same day we went to the ER and he was positive to Hepatitis A antibodies. He never finished his Hep A&B vaccines before his mission so chances are he has had Hepatitis A at some point in his life to build the antibodies. The doctor in the ER originally thought that perhaps the Hep A was causing the cholesystitis (that has been known to happen) but since the ultrasound showed he was full of stones the two aren't related. It's not much of a worry since Hep A is an acute virus and very, very rarely causes any long term damage. Most younger people don't even feel symptoms if they catch the virus and it typically resolves in less than a year.

Although it's been a stressful, tiring, and painful week we both feel incredibly blessed. Garlan is healing quickly (although not quick enough for his active life style), we finally have answers to the elevated liver enzymes and can get some life insurance. We had great care by doctors and nurses, and had the support and prayers from lots of friends and family.

Here are some post surgery pictures. His poor tummy is still swollen - he's just hoping that goes away and the scars are gone by our cruise. :)