Last week I woke up in the middle of the night with a blindingly sharp pain in my abdomen. I didn’t wake Mike up at first, but sat on the edge of my bed sobbing because of course I was dying, and oh-my-poor-kids-they-will -grow-up-without-a-mother. It hurt enough that I had trouble breathing and I could barely talk, so at 3 am I headed to the emergency room, both kids in tow.

Of course as soon as I registered - with the most horrible person I have met in a long time, but that is a different story - the pain went away. Well. I sure wasn’t going to sit in that hospital for four hours so they could tell me I had bad gas, so we went home.

I kept thinking it was just gas, and wasn’t really going to do anything to follow up until the next day, when my daycare provider told me she had the same kind of pain after her first child and it ended up being gallstones. So, off to my primary care doc I went, and multiple doctor appointments and one ultrasound later was told I do indeed have a gallstone. One. Rather small one. But still, the doctor told me, it has to come out.

Apparently one doesn’t just have a gallstone removed, you have to take the whole gall bladder out. (Dude, if I were on Star Trek, wouldn’t Bones just zap me with some lasery thing in his office and the stone would be gone?) The gall bladder, I have come to find out, is only slightly more useful than the appendix, but still not nearly as important as, say, almost every other organ in your body. So, out it will come.

I am scheduled for surgery next Friday, the 17th, and it is a laproscopic out patient procedure, so even though I will be under general anesthesia, I will be home in time for cocktails. No nursing William for 24 hours though, no driving for 3-4 days and my doc says it will be a week to two before I am 100% again. Not so bad for what used to be a major surgery.

My tonsils and appendix are already gone, so hopefully this is the last organ I will find out is not actually required for, you know, living, and I will hang on to the rest of them.