Prayers for my best friend

[JoitheArtist]

As some of you know, my best friend has fibromyalgia...and a 3-yr-old. Not a particularly fun combination. She's been working with the doctors to try to find a medication and diet combination to reduce the pain, and thought she'd found one that worked.

Until she noticed that one of the medications seemed to be giving her an ulcer. More pain! And her stomach pain has been increasing.

Today, she told me that she went in to see her doctor: the pain was getting worse, and she'd gotten back some abnormal lab results.

They don't really know anything right now, but the pain seems to be centered around her gallbladder and her white blood cell count is up. She's on antibiotics and painkillers now, to see if it's just an infection they can fight. But if it doesn't respond, she may have to have surgery.

Please keep her and her family in your thoughts and prayers!

[jedimaster91]

If her gallbladder does need to come out, it's a very easy surgery. It's all done laproscopically these days, so she can expect to be sore a couple days and then feel MUCH better with regard to the stomach pain.

Fingers crossed that she won't have to have surgery, though.

[AdminAssistant]

Ditto what Jedimaster said about the gallbladder surgery, although I had a harder time with the post-surgery pain. People tell you that you can work the next day. These people are full of shit. I was curled up in a fetal position hopped up on hydrocodone the next day. At any rate, it's a common and easy surgery. I was at 100% in a week.

[Sheldonrs]

Good thoughts and prayers for your friend and her family.

[JoitheArtist]

If her gallbladder does need to come out, it's a very easy surgery. It's all done laproscopically these days, so she can expect to be sore a couple days and then feel MUCH better with regard to the stomach pain.

Fingers crossed that she won't have to have surgery, though.

Yeah, I did a little research and noticed that. Still, it's coming on top of her regular fibromyalgia pain, so we don't really know how that will affect things.

[MaggieTheCat]

My gall bladder was extremely infected and enlarged when I finally had it out and I had 12 marbled-sized stones. They almost had to do it "the old fashioned way" where they cut you open because they weren't sure that they could get it all laproscopically. Luckily they were able to make the incision large enough during the laproscopic surgery so they didn't have to do that. My incision is still about three times as long as a normal laproscopic surgery incision and I was in a lot of pain for a long time after the surgery. I went home the same day, but I was laid up for several days afterword and definitely was not at 100% for several weeks, possibly months, I don't remember. I went to work 5 days after my surgery, which was a huge mistake because I could barely get up to walk across the office to the printer, let alone walking around the call center like I was supposed to be.

Anyway, sorry for the tangent, I don't mean to scare anyone but everyone's pain tolerance is different, especially depending on how bad the gall bladder/stones are. Hopefully if your friend does have it out, her's will be easier than mine. I do feel much, much better now (had my surgery done a little over a year ago), a lot of aches and pains that I had that I didn't think could be at all remotely connected to a gall bladder have disappeared since I've had mine out.

[JustaCashier]

Sending out healing thoughts for your friend, Joi...



Mike