Comment by __m

That’s what my doctor said when I came in with a fever that wouldn’t go away. I had some mild discomfort in my side a few days before and based on the location I concluded it was my galbladder. By the time I got to the doctor the discomfort was gone but I still had a fever. He poked me in the side a few times, I didn’t feel a thing, and told me it couldn’t be my galbladder as I would be screaming out in pain if it was.

I insisted it was, so he agreed to do a quick blood test for inflammation markers to easy my mind. Shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes for the nurse to get the results and send me home. 30 minutes later the doctor called me back into the office, apparently my values were off the chart and he already informed the hospital of my arrival.

Spent a couple of hours in ER, where the infected galbladder was confirmed, and was eventually sent home with some antibiotics. Since I wasn’t in pain they preferred not to operate while it was inflamed. Then a year or so later they tried and failed to remove it, but that’s a whole other story.

I read a neat trick someone had for the ambiguous "out of 10 where is the pain" question doctors give you. Find a reference point first: "If five is a broken leg, I am at a 7"

Otherwise my 3 could be someone elses 7, as someone who has had chronic pain and a shifted pain tolerance it's proven pretty useful as even doctors struggle to convey what a worrisome level of pain would be without knowing what you have been through.

~18 hour gallbladder attack where i could not keep any liquids in made me consider bashing my head into the wall next to my bed until i pass out.

(No longer have a gallbladder, thankfully.)

It felt like I was in a ring with Floyd Mayweather and a nuclear bomb in my stomach going up and down. Think twice if you want to play out deciding on a removal or not. You might be back again in a few years.

My father used to have pain in his abdomen out of nowhere with a couple years in between, but they never could figure out what was wrong with him even during an extended hospital stay at one point. I think the earliest time I must have been in elementary school, but my first semester in college during the weekend where my parents were going to come down to visit for the first time, he had the recurring pain again that got so much worse than usual that he was jaundiced and my mother forced him to go to the hospital again (medical situations are basically the only circumstance where I've seen him get irritable), and it turned out that his gall bladder was completely full of stones that they said would have started spilling over into his liver and put that at risk as well if he delayed coming in for a few more hours. They removed his gall bladder, and he's never felt any symptoms in the decade since.

Was worried it would be worse, all i get from it is that stuff with a lot of fats might cause more frequent visits to the bathroom (something one might not want to eat anyway all that often), before i could not eat a slice of pizza without an attack.

YMMV, people are individuals.