UPDATE: Two weeks after surgery, I’m much better; thanks for asking

By David McElroy · January 24, 2018

Women who have had children have been the best source of perspective for me about the pain that comes from gallbladder problems. Every woman I’ve talked with who has had children and also had gallstones that led to a cholecystectomy tell me that their gallbladder problems were 10 times more painful than any childbirth.

I’ll never be able to make that comparison myself — thank goodness — but I can definitely say that the pain I experienced off and on last month was the most intense pain I’ve ever felt. I’m glad it’s behind me.

Since I’ve gotten several emails over the last week asking how I’m recovering, I’ll give a brief update about how things are going.

It’s been 17 days since surgery and I’m not far from declaring myself back to normal. There was a lot of pain for the first week, but I had pain medication to help me deal with the issues. Believe it or not, one of the worst aspects of the recovery was being unable to sleep on my stomach for about 10 or 12 days. Since that’s primarily how I sleep, it was difficult to get rest on my back.

The only remaining problem is that I get exhausted very easily every day. At my follow-up visit to the surgeon last week, he told me this was normal, especially since I was under general anesthesia for six times longer than had been expected. He said the anesthesia can tend to have lasting effects. A nurse friend told me she figured I’d feel this way for six to eight weeks.

The surgeon told me that I’m in ridiculously good health for someone who hadn’t bothered to take care of his weight.

“Get your weight down and you’ll easily live past 100,” he told me.

Maybe that was hyperbole. Maybe not, but it sounds like a good reason to eat better.

I don’t remember whether I’ve had reason to mention this here, but I was diagnosed with low thyroid function a couple of months before this gallbladder issue showed up. Since doctors were in the middle of adjusting the dosage for the Synthroid I’m taking, it’s possible that some of the tiredness I’m experiencing now is because the dosage still isn’t quite right. Only time will tell.

I still get tired too easily to go back to working my full work schedule, so I’m still losing a lot of work hours, which means my income has been cut pretty significantly.

On the positive side, I’m probably going to be writing an offer for a house for a real estate client Thursday. (I actually had one contract with this couple already, but it fell through on the inspection.) The commission from just one house of this price brings a commission equal to what I’ve been making at both part-time jobs combined — for a couple of months. So after I get two or three such commissions, I hope to leave both part-time jobs behind.

That would give me more time to sell houses — and maybe even more time to make films again.

Overall, the medical situation is much better now and I’m not far from normal — at least in the physical sense. And one side benefit from this whole mess is that I’m down 22 pounds on the scale since five weeks ago. Since I’m eating less food these days, maybe that positive trend can continue.

Thanks so much to those of you who’ve expressed concern and inquired how things are going.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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?

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