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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The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

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