I'm home...

Well, I’m back home.  I arrived at the hospital 7AM yesterday morning and sat around until about 2.30PM when things actually started to happen.  I remember looking up at the clock as they gave me the anaesthetic at 3pm, then the next time I was really aware of was sometime around 7pm.  I was home by 11.00AM this morning. I always have a hard time with generals and usually feel quite nauseous for a few hours afterwards, which I did, but by around mid-night I was feeling fine.Once more the nutters were out in the hospital! I was told that while I was sleeping an approx. 80 year old granny with dementia tried to get into my bed, then tried to get into the bed of the guy sleeping across from me.  Actually she was quite a piece of work — earlier (around 2AM when I couldn’t sleep) she was screaming at all the nurses and I learnt several new insults.  She told one nurse, “I’ve seen better looking things than you crawl out of a piece of cheese!”.After a while they calmed her down and she sat by the counter with them all night until she had another turn in the morning around 6AM and smashed their computer!The keyhole surgery went really well, very little pain at all, even though there are 4 incisions, most are only 5mm long.  The wierdest bit is that the most painful thing is a nerve in my shoulder — they say that to do the surgery, they inflate your stomache with CO2, this forces your diaphragm up, which causes the nerve that runs into your shoulder to stretch.  At times today it’s been quite painful, but it seems to be settling down now, and they say it goes after 24 – 48 hours.When I spoke to the surgeon this morning, it turns out my gall bladder was a real mess — it had obviously been inflamed and irritated for a long time, the walls were about 1cm thick instead of the normal 2mm.  Inside this were two quite large stones, and then lots of small ones ranging from fine sand to small gravel in size.  It’s the small ones which are the real bugger as these are what caused my pancreatitis as they get out into the duct and cause issues.I’m back on a normal diet already and with two days rest, should be good to go back to work on Monday.  They’ve advised me to stay off the alcohol until after christmas though to really let my pancreas heal up.Oh — Karina opted NOT to take a photo of the stones as they were pretty gross looking, still swilling around in bile in a jar and not that pleasant to look at.