The Queen of Dunces

This is why I don't deserve a gall bladder:

I have just attended a "party" (staff morning tea).  I meant to bring my own cakes to this party for my own purposes - cakes baked without butter, dairy or gluten, and therefore quite safe for consumption.

I forgot to bring my stuff, so instead I ate what was there.  I had a shortbread biscuit (Moron!  Those things a full of butter!), an apple teacake thing (Covered in cream, you idiot!) and a mini pavlova (More cream?  What is wrong with you?).

Any single one of these things is probably enough to trigger unpleasantness with my gall bladder in it's current state - and I ate all three.

Because something in my head said "oh, go on, you haven't had anything nice for a while and it is a party after all", and somehow that counted more than the other voice in my head that said "your gall bladder hates you, and it hates all of this stuff, and it will have its revenge".

I am, indeed, the Queen of the Dunces.

And, of course, now that I've actually eaten that crap and know that pain awaits me, I'm smart enough to know I should have made better choices.  Not smart enough to actually make those choices, just smart enough to know that I should have.

My project for this year:  make better choices.

How galling...

So, my gall bladder decided to make a point during my vacation in New Zealand.

I believe the point it wanted to make was something along the lines of:  "you don't deserve a gall bladder."

At least, that's what my doctors have decided the outcome should be.

I currently still have a gall bladder (and also a 2.3cm gall stone in an awkward position), but I suspect this situation will be changed by the end of February.

I've been waiting for a date for surgery from the public hospital, and here at the office we were taking bets as to whether it would be in the middle of O-Week or during the week I'm presenting a paper in a conference in Sydney.

Sure enough, they phoned me today and proudly offered me the day I'm on a plane heading down to a four day conference.  They're going to get back to me with another date.

I'm hedging my bets, though, and seeing what the private system can offer me.  I'll pick whoever can give me the least obnoxious time to have strangers do strange things to my body while I'm unconscious.

I'm not thrilled about having the operation.  I've always felt one's innards should remain "in".  Everything in the body does something, I'm sure of it.  Plus, all of the other bits in the body are kind of expecting it to be there.  I don't feel comfortable saying "oh, it's just a gall bladder - people get those removed all the time!"

Oh, well.  It's my own fault for being a fat white chick for most of my life.

Gut wrenching

I have an exam tomorrow morning, and my gall bladder is playing up.  Or maybe it's my functional dyspepsia.   I don't know.  I have two diagnoses and I can't work out which symptoms belong to which one.  I suspect there's a certain amount of cross-over.

Meanwhile, whatever it is has been playing up since last Wednesday, so I'm kind of hoping it isn't my gall bladder or it might be an indication that I should be getting it removed.  I'm not a big fan of having internal organs removed if such things can be avoided.

The discomfort seems to be in the wrong place, anyway, so I'm assuming it's the dyspepsia - although attacks for both usually clear up after a couple of days, so it's a bit distracting either way.

The most annoying thing about both is the fact that I'm really bad at working out what triggers an attack.  It's the whole cumulative thing that's throwing me out.  Any given item of food could be perfectly fine or the thing that's going to give me hours of grief - it depends on what else I've eaten lately.

Take sausages, for example.  I can eat a sausage from a street vendor one day and have absolutely no problems.  I can even eat two such sausages in a week without issues.  Then, one day, I will eat a sausage from a street vendor and it will trigger an attack - not because there was something particularly bad about that sausage, but because something I'd eaten the day before (or, in some cases, two days earlier) had primed my innards for an issue, and the sausage was just the catalyst.

Maybe my gut is giving me signals that I've been "primed", but I'm not very good at recognising them, or maybe it really is a case of Russian Roulette with what I stick in my mouth.  I seem to go from "I feel fine" to "dang, my stomach is rather upset" without any middle ground.

Obviously, I should be adjusting my diet to exclude things like sausages, and maybe if I started eating like a 70s hippy I'd be able to avoid the primers and catalysts altogether.  It's just surprisingly hard to pull that off when you a) eat with other people and don't want to inconvenience them, b) get food from cafes and c) travel.

Stupid faulty internal bits.  Why can't I just eat stupid things that are no good for me like normal people?