Maybe it wasn’t correct choice, but I’m not having surgery Friday

By David McElroy · December 28, 2017

If I had taken the advice of my emergency room doctor tonight, I would be in a hospital bed — getting ready for surgery in the morning. I didn’t take his advice, though, so I’m back home. Only time will tell whether I made the right decision.

I started feeling lousy on Christmas Day and I felt worse as the week went along. At first, it was just discomfort in my chest and back. I felt terrible in multiple ways. I went to work each day but I barely pulled myself through each day until it was late enough to go home and collapse.

By Thursday morning, the discomfort had turned to serious pain. I went to the clinic of a friend who’s a doctor about 11:30 a.m. After examining me and taking X-rays, he suspected the problem was my gallbladder, but he couldn’t be sure without an ultrasound.

He suggested I immediately head to a hospital emergency room.

By the time I got to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Birmingham, I was in the most pain I’ve ever experienced. The pain in my chest and back was so strong I couldn’t even breathe deeply. I sat in the waiting room and researched all the negative possibilities of gallbladder problems while I waited for a doctor to see me. (I also spent a lot of time thinking about why I didn’t have a wife to come with me, but that’s a bigger issue.)

Simple tests ruled out other issues and the evidence kept pointing to gallstones. I was taken up a floor to an ultrasound machine.

By about mid afternoon, the pain suddenly subsided. I still didn’t feel back to normal, but I felt the best I’ve felt in a couple of weeks. Had I passed a stone in some way? Is that what had been going on all week?

The ultrasound results confirmed that I have gallstones. The gallbladder itself wasn’t enlarged or inflamed, but some of my liver enzymes and bilirubin were strongly elevated above normal. (If you’re like me, you have little idea what those things even mean.) The doctor said this indicated that the liver is upset about what’s going on.

The ER doctor went off to consult a surgeon, who agreed that my gallbladder needs to come out. They recommended I stay at the hospital tonight and have the surgery in the morning.

At first, I agreed to their plan, but I started questioning this course of action as I started texting with my doctor friend and reading other information online. It wasn’t that I thought the doctors at the hospital were wrong; it was simply that I wasn’t certain they were right.

The doctor warned me that this could turn into pancreatitis. There were several other dire possibilities, but that’s the one I remember most clearly.

I’m home now — about to get into bed so I can get back to work in the morning — and I still don’t know whether I made the right decision.

Maybe the doctor was right. I don’t know. But I do know that he said the other issues that could develop from this would come with their own warning signs — which will give me time to get back to a hospital in case I need to.

When we make medical decisions in emergency rooms, it’s hard to know whether we’re making the right ones. We rarely have enough information — and the information you find online can be wildly contradictory — and we generally defer to trained physicians who are the experts.

That might be what I should have done. But I couldn’t find any downside to taking my time and figuring out all my options. The doctor friend with whom I was texting suggested that he might be able to help me fix the issue through dietary changes, for instance. I just know that I wanted more opinions and more information before I decided.

For me, that was the right thing to do. Time will tell whether it was the right medical decision, but it was definitely the decision I was most comfortable with knowing what I knew at the time.

I hope that very competent ER doctor will forgive me for not taking his advice.

Note: My illness this week kept me unable to finish my new podcast, so it will be delayed a bit. I’ll finish the first episode for you just as soon as I can.

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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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