I can't decide whether this is a serious attempt to describe my situation or not. Hmmm. The most commonly performed surgery in the US- perfectly straightforward. A liberation from the pain and inconvenience of acute cholecystitis.
So, I have the stone in a small plastic specimen jar. It's amber (bilirubin I would guess from that clarified-butter colour) and about an inch in diameter. Kind of innocuous but also without any 'bodily' association. Teeth look they've grown out of you. Bones look like they belong inside you. This looks like it's not mine. I cannot believe I housed it.
I wanted the surgeon to give me my gallbladder. He told me that it needed to go to Pathology to be checked over, but told me I could have the gallstone.
Did you know: that healthy gallbladders are robbins-egg blue?
that you can grow a gallstone so big it fills up your entire
gallbladder?
that some gallbladders can be choked with
gallstones (one surgeon described them spilling out like
cockroaches when the gallbladder is cut in half)
