Gallbladder Out

[TrillumHunter]

Hi all,

I had my gallbladder out on July 25th and I've been waiting to see what would happen. A little background-I've been gluten-free since April of 07. I had a tremendous turnaround in my health and hadn't felt so great in years. Then, around October of 07, I started getting sick alot. I thought I was getting glutened somehow despite being very careful. I decided that I was still healing and I cut more things out of my diet. I didn't get any better. I got worse. I finally broke down when, despite eating 400mg of iron a day, I wound up anemic again. I saw a gi doctor and had an endo/colonscopy and found that ,indeed, my gi tract was full of ulcerations and irritations. I was given a tentative diagnosis of Crohn's. I went for a barium swallow and they found large calcified stones. I had never experienced any pain. He said it needed to come out. I didn't want to do it because my understanding was that it isn't always necessary. My friend, a nurse, encouraged me to do it as she has seen lots of complications from gallbladders. So, they took it out and it was ROTTEN! The surgeon described it as festered to my poor husband. He told my friend I wasn't far from being septic. Scary, huh? And I never had any pain at all.

Here I am, a little over a week later, with no complaints. No nausea, retching, heartburn, diarrhea, bloating and so on. I can eat dairy with no problem. I can eat my homemade gluten-free bread.

I'm sharing because I made a mistake. I assumed that everything was "glutening." I blamed the celiac for all my trouble. It's an error that could have caused me real harm (even death) if I hadn't corrected it. I hope this helps someone else!

[neesee]

Hi TrilluimHunter, I'm glad to see you are feeling better. It sure is easy to blame everything on the celiac. I did the same thing recently. I had an attack of acute sigmoid diverticulitis. It went untreated for a couple of days because I told the er Dr. it was probably the celiac and she didn't look at any thing else. Big mistake. two days later, the 2nd er Dr. got it right. I spent a week in the hospital on IV antibotics. I thought I was going to lose my colon. I have a colonoscopy scheduled for sept. 4th to see how much damage I have.

We need to stop blaming everything on the celiac! Sometimes it just isn't.

I hope you continue to do well

neesee

[Phyllis28]

Bad gallbladders cause all kinds of grief. Hope you are feeling at 100% very soon. I had my gallbladder out in Aug 07 and, like you feel, much better.