Hulk Hogan’s Revenge?
Right after I mentioned him in my last email, Hulk Hogan died. I think he tried to get revenge from beyond the grave because the next night, I wound up in the ER and had to get emergent surgery.
If you're interested in hearing more about my medical adventure, you can read the details in the "Personal" section at the end. But since these emails are supposed to be about my creative endeavors, let's get into that...
PROFESSIONAL
A few people responded to my last email saying they'd watch my "Everything I did Wrong as a Filmmaker" video series, so I think it's an idea I'll pursue. I've already started writing down my most entertaining anecdotes. My goal is for the series to be funny and insightful. What I don't want to do is make videos of me just whining about my mistakes. Nobody wants that!
Regarding Cinder, my post-filmmaking endeavor, I know I've been a bit vague. But we're all friends here, and the idea is for these emails to be a conversation. What I will say is that I'm currently focusing on my writing. Specifically, I'm transitioning into writing for comics. It's a different beast than screenwriting, but I'm enjoying the challenge so far. Hopefully, in the near future, I'll have details about upcoming projects.
PERSONAL
A couple of times in June, I experienced what I thought was painful bloating. It felt like I was John Hurt, and an alien was going to burst out of my chest. After about five hours, the pain would subside.
On the Thursday night that Hulk Hogan died, I had another attack. I tried a hot shower, a massage, OTC medication, and ended up walking around my neighborhood at 2 am until the pain finally stopped.
The next night, the same thing happened. But this time, the pain wasn't going away, and at 3 am, I realized I was going to have to drive myself to the ER. When I walked in, clutching the area just below my right ribs where the pain was, the charge nurse took one look at me and declared, "It's your gallbladder."
They put me in a room. Pain distorts all sense of time, and it seemed like I was in there for hours. It hurt to lie down, so I paced around the room massaging the problem area. Finally, a resident came in to see me, and he echoed what the nurse at the desk said. They gave me some pain meds, took some blood for labs, and sent me to get an ultrasound.
They found one gallstone in my gallbladder and determined that I was suffering from biliary colic, or a gallbladder attack. For those of you who don't know what the gallbladder does (I certainly didn't before all this), when you eat fatty foods, your liver produces bile to help digest them. That bile goes through the gallbladder on its way to the stomach. When it does, the ducts of the gallbladder open up to allow it to pass. Sometimes gallstones form, and when those ducts shrink back down, they can close on the gallstone, and it is excruciating. Usually, these attacks last a few hours. I was given a referral to schedule a gallbladder removal, and sent on my way with the pain back in full force. They wouldn't give me pain meds right then since I was driving, but they gave me a prescription for two days of Norco.
The Norco did nothing. Unlike the previous attacks, the pain didn't stop. Instead, I went from feeling like John Hurt to feeling like someone was stabbing me repeatedly. I barely slept all of Saturday because there was no position I could lie in that wasn't painful. With the surgery center closed until Monday, and who knows how long it would take to get me in, there was no way I could endure this any longer. So I decided to go to Urgent Care right when they opened on Sunday morning to see if they could prescribe me a stronger pain med. That would be cheaper than two visits to the ER, I thought.
At 8 am, I went in and saw the provider right away. He said, "I think you're going to have to go back to the ER. I think they thought your gallbladder could come out eventually, but I think it has other plans, and you need to get it removed now. I don't have anything stronger than Norco. The only thing I could give you would thin your blood, and if you have to have surgery today, the last thing you want is a blood thinner." This visit lasted maybe 5 minutes.
Back to the ER I went! I think there's a rivalry between ER shifts. The resident who saw me on Sunday morning seemed to question everything the ER did at my previous visit.
"Did they give you anything for the nausea?" he asked. I told him no. He put his hand on my arm and leaned in confidentially, "I would have given you something for the nausea." Then he told me, "The radiologists who were working when you got your ultrasound are usually residents. And they didn't notice anything. But the radiologists who came in on the next shift did. I think you have acute cholecystitis. I'm going to have you get a CT scan to confirm."
Sometimes a gallstone can actually block the bile ducts. That can cause inflammation in the gallbladder. Liquid can back up in the gallbladder, and that can lead to infection. My white blood cell count was high on the first ER visit, and that probably should have tipped them off that my body was fighting something.
The CT scan confirmed that, yes, my gallbladder needed to come out right then. Everything happened pretty fast after that, and my gallbladder was out by Sunday afternoon. It's a relatively simple surgery done with four 1-inch incisions. I stayed overnight, and the hospital sent me home the next morning. On Tuesday, I got a call from the surgery center saying they received my referral, and asked when I would like to schedule my gallbladder removal. "That gallbladder's gone!" I said.
Two medical professionals at the hospital said my gallbladder was pretty "gnarly." Looking through the after-visit notes later, apparently gnarly is the official medical term for "gangrenous." The inflammation caused the walls of my gallbladder to expand, cutting off circulation and causing tissue to die. It's a complication that can be fatal and usually happens to 80-year-olds. I don't know why it happened to me.
But I'm doing great now!
TLDR: I had a gangrenous gallbladder removed.