First Edition: Your Gall Bladder & Pregnancy
In this first edition, I want to talk about our gall bladders. This might be an unusual place to start, since it's not an organ we pay much attention to, but for personal reasons, I think it is a good place to start. In my own experience of becoming a mother for the first time, I discovered that there were a lot of "things they don't tell you about pregnancy." I say that in quotations because I found myself saying that a lot all of a sudden to anyone who would listen. That's because I had an expectation that, since women have been giving birth for thousands of years, we probably knew everything there was to know about it and that I would be fully debriefed about EVERYTHING that could or would happen. I was wrong. I began a journey of discovery when I got pregnant, about my own body, about health and about the consequences of pregnancy. The first thing I learned about was my gall bladder.
A short time after I gave birth to Mariella, I was struck by a sudden and agonizing pain in my torso that literally took my breath away. I remember I was sitting on the couch, relaxing after putting her to bed, and indulging in a snack. The episode came on like a freight train. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't move. Now this was in the fall of 2009, right around the time the media was buzzing about the H1N1 flu virus. Remember that? Yeah, well, the only thing I could think was, "Oh my God, I have H1N1 and I'm dying."
I ended up in the emergency room in the middle of the night, with a newborn in tow. After hours of the worst pain I've ever felt in my life (and remember I had just given birth), the doctor's reported that I "probably have gall stones." What??? They sent me home with Vicodin and told me to follow up with my GP but warned me that I was likely going to have to have gall bladder surgery. My husband, being the superior researcher that he is, decided he wanted a second opinion because of all the horror stories he'd heard about gall bladder removal surgery. He said that everyone he'd talked to who'd had the surgery "continued to live with pain and digestive problems." He recommended we try a homeopathic purge that he found on the Internet.
In the meantime, my attacks were becoming more frequent, more severe, lasting longer and becoming more resilient against the pain killers. At my worst I was taking three Vicodin to dull the pain.....and it wasn't working. My attacks would last as long as an hour sometimes and I began to describe them like "one long labor contraction that won't let up." I would be on all fours on the floor, frozen and panting like a sick dog. Afraid of surgery and the consequences thereof, I decided to give the purge a try.
The purge was basically a recipe of drinking Epsom salts every two hours for a whole day and then drinking a whole cup of olive oil and lemon juice. Then you spend the whole next day on the toilet, purging your gall stones and everything else in your system. I'm not recommending this process, but if you're curious about it, I'm sure it can be found easily by Googling.
It worked at first, I didn't have another attack for a few weeks. But then they started again. I still wasn't ready to give in to surgery, so I decided to do the purge again (they say it can take a few tries and apparently some people do it as a regular maintenance thing). This time, I wanted proof so I did a very gross thing. I put on rubber gloves, got a sieve and "fished out" my gall stones. There were a lot. I counted over 25 stones, some the size of a quarter. And this was my second purge. After collecting my bounty, I cleaned them off and put them in a baggie and stuck them in the freezer so they would keep until I could take them to the doctor. I thought, "Surely that must be it. I'm good now." Wrong again.
About a week later, I was hit again. Hard. This time I decided to see the surgeon. I took my baggy of stones, to which he responded with shock and amusement. "How did you do this?" he asked before he paraded my baggy around the office for show-and-tell. I told him I purged them out. He said he'd never heard of such a thing. In the end, he removed my gall bladder but before he did, I asked him if I could see it once it was out. He said no but that he would take photos of it for me. When I came to after surgery, he showed me those photos. After two purges, and after removing at least 25 stones on my second purge, my gall bladder still looked like a bag of marbles.
Now, luckily, I haven't gone on to live with continued pain and digestive problems. But I'm discussing this with you now because I learned something very important that I think all women who plan to get pregnant or have had similar experiences should know. You see, I wanted to know why this happened to me. What I learned is that pregnancy predisposes women to high risk of gall stones because of the high hormone levels. Progesterone inhibits the function of the gall bladder, relaxing it and causing bile to build up inside it, which leads to stones.
About 12 percent of pregnant women each year develop gall bladder problems during pregnancy and can end up having surgery. That's as many as 480,000 women in the United States each year! Some even have to have emergency surgery while they're still pregnant! This is not pseudoscience. This is a well documented medical fact. Yet, not one doctor or OB warned me of this when I got pregnant. And you know the response when I asked my doctor if they thought my pregnancy led to my gall bladder problems? "I suppose it's possible."
Almost a half a million women each year end up with gall bladder problems as a result of pregnancy and no one is talking about it? If someone had warned me that this could happen to me, that there was a good chance that this could happen to me, I would have eaten a low cholesterol diet during my pregnancy. I would have made strides to stay healthy, be proactive and possibly avoid this extremely painful condition that inevitably led to surgery and the loss of an organ (an organ, by the way, that many doctors will say is UNNECESSARY, and that many alternative health professionals will vehemently disagree). Maybe it would have happened anyway. But I was never given the chance to see.
Instead, it affected my ability to breast feed my baby, it caused me unrelenting pain that made it hard for me to enjoy and care for my newborn. It caused me to lose an organ, and it cost me a hefty medical bill that took several years to pay off. So, ladies, I urge you. If you are pregnant or planning to become pregnant, be sure you consider your gall bladder in your pregnancy diet. Consider a low cholesterol diet and talk to your health care professionals about this possible consequence of pregnancy. You may still be one of the unlucky 12 percent, but at least you'll be armed with knowledge and that's a powerful thing. We are our own best advocate when it comes to our health.
And keep in mind that gall bladder surgery in the United States each year carries about a $10 billion price tag. About 700,000 procedures are done each year and as many as 480,000 of them are women who got pregnant. On the other hand, the price tag on your good health, is $0. Nobody's making money when you're making good, educated health decisions.
No comments:
Post a Comment