Maybe it’s not Food Poisoning Trying to Kill You

Do you know how large a bile duct is? I didn’t. But now I do. It is about 2-4 mm. Which isn’t very large. It is so strange to ponder if most of my readership understands the metric system. Most of the world knows metric better than imperial measurements, but most of my readers are from the US where I wonder if they really know the different between 2 mm and 1/4 inch, but I digress. Let’s just say that a bile duct is typically no larger than the size of a standard drinking straw. In fact a drinking straw would be a little large for parts of the bile duct.

Why this sudden interest in something as unremarkable as bile ducts? Well if they happen to get clogged, that can be a very bad thing for human beings. It generally causes large amounts of pain and will eventually lead to certain death. I had heard of the word gallstone, but I never really had any interest to find out just what exactly a gallstone is or more importantly, what problems a gallstone can create. The problems with gallstones is that they can plug the bile duct and that causes all sorts of issues for the body.

But I didn’t know any of that when I came home and told Jodie that she looked a bit yellow. I had been gone for the weekend seeing my doctor in Los Angeles. Jodie was staying at home trying to recover from what she was sure was yet another horrific case of food poisoning. She has been suffering from lots of gastrointestinal issues more and more lately. We were sure that her habit of eating yummy fried chicken from gas station fry cookers was finally catching up with her.

I was just happy she seemed to be recovering and besides I was also just thrilled I was going to be able to make it out of our home. We live in California and we have been having some crazy weather this past year. California appears to always love going back and forth between massive droughts and torrential downpours. This year it has been the downpours. We have gotten so much water and snow this year it has been impressive. You would think that would be fabulous for our massively dried out state, which it is, but too much water in the wrong place at the wrong time also causes devastating floods. Two days before I was to leave for Los Angeles we received record setting rains that melted much of the low lying snow. That in turn caused unprecedented floods that literally washed out several roads and about four river crossings near my house. We were nearly stranded and unable to even leave our house.

Luckily for me, I was able to make it out of my house. And that was pretty much the only thing I was focused on because I needed to get to Los Angeles and get my hormone pellets implanted. Yes I knew Jodie was sick, but I was just so focused on moving forward and accomplishing my various goals and projects and besides she was taking care of herself. However when I returned home from my appointment, I turned to Jodie and noticed she had a distinctly yellow color to her skin. I told her that she needed to go to the emergency room. She told me she would deal with it the next day as she had a doctor’s appointment then anyway, I had my doubts but I kept my mouth closed.

The next day her doctor called and cancelled on her. Jodie happened to tell the front desk lady that she was yellow and asked what she should do. The lady told her to go to the emergency room right away. That day I had a hair appointment. Which one might think would be no big deal, however for me, that was only my second hair appointment over the last thirty years or so. And my first appointment to cut my brand new four thousand dollar wig. So I was a bit nervous, and apprehensive, and overly focused on my hair appointment. And besides I didn’t really understand that all of these events were eventually going to lead up to Jodie almost dying. I just thought she had really, really, really bad food poisoning.

Thus I went to my hair appointment and Jodie went to the emergency room. I got my hair cut. She got checked in, found a seat in the waiting room, and waited. She waited and waited and waited and eventually they did some tests, and she waited, and they did more tests and she waited some more. At some point closer to midnight, she got a bed in the actual emergency room and was able to get a few tiny cat naps in.

I had to get my nails done the next day and besides we had no idea what was going on with Jodie and it wasn’t like I could help. (Can you tell the level of guilt I feel at carrying on like this wasn’t going to be as horrific as it all turned out?) At some point during my nail appointment Jodie called and told me they found a gallstone clogging her bile duct and that afternoon they were going to do an ERCP to clear the blockage. I got my nails finished, dashed home and gathered all of the items Jodie had requested I pack for her, and raced down to the hospital.

They still had not admitted her. They didn’t have any beds. What that actually means by the way, is that they had plenty of actual beds, they just didn’t have the staff to run all of those areas of the hospital. Sucks. I found Jodie in the ER and just a few minutes after that they took her away for the procedure. Apparently even though they do this procedure in the operating room, and you are completely knocked out, it is a procedure because they are not cutting you open. They have a device that goes down your throat, through your stomach and into your small intestine. Then a wire snakes out and goes up into your bile duct and swipes out any stuck gallstones. This procedure took a few hours and when it was over they wheeled her into her own hospital room, thankfully. We were also thrilled when they allowed her to leave the very next day.

Often they will remove the gallbladder after removing a gallstone, but Jodie’s looked fine so they said they would take it out in a few months. We were both very tired, but very thankful that her ordeal appeared to be over. I left the very next day to go back down to Los Angeles for a couple of days for another medical appointment. When I got home I thought that Jodie still looked super yellow. I wasn’t sure though so I kept my mouth shut and hoped for the best. But when I woke the next day and saw her, I told her that I thought she was getting yellow again. She wasn’t sure and so she again decided to wait and see. The next day it was undeniable and she again went to the emergency room.

That day was the first day back to work after our spring break vacation and I felt super pressured to be back in the classroom, especially considering how many days of work I have missed this year already. So I went back to work and Jodie went to the hospital and again checked in and began to wait. At least this time she was able to get a private room in the emergency room and it only took a few hours. After much testing, they decided that she had another gallstone blocking her bile duct and she needed to have another ERCP. They scheduled it for the next day. She had the procedure and it appeared to work, however they found something they couldn’t identify and that was when the real terror began because they started throwing out wildly speculative words like tumor and cancer and pancreas. Strung together it sounded pretty much like a death sentence.

Their advice was to get Jodie to a UC hospital that had the proper equipment to put a camera down to her bile duct and actually scope out what was happening. The best advice we got was to make an appointment with our primary care doctor to get a referral. They then discharged her from the hospital for the second time and told me to take her home.

I drove her home hoping for the best. Jodie made an appointment for the next day with her primary care doctor and we both went to bed and tried to sleep. I did, but Jodie didn’t. She had a really difficult night but thought that it was just normal for everything she had gone through lately and she just tried to deal with it all as best she could. The next morning she told me she was okay. I went to work thinking that everything was in process and we just had to wait. (See that’s that guilt again!) I spoke to Jodie throughout the day and she seemed to be okay, but also extremely tired. She asked me to get her some things from the store and so it wasn’t until about five in the evening until I got home.

She was on the couch, wrapped in a bunch of fleece, and she was shivering uncontrollably. I tried speaking to her for awhile and she told me that she had a fever but she had taken Tylenol and that she was fine. She didn’t think she needed to go to the doctor, that she would be fine until the next morning. I sat down next to her and held her hand and looked at her. She couldn’t stop shivering and that was when I noticed she was panting. I asked why she was breathing so quickly. She didn’t know and wasn’t really concerned about it happening. We chatted for a little while with her sounding fairly normal. Except for the shivering and the panting.

In hindsight it all seems so stupid. Like I was being so incredibly stupid. Why couldn’t I see what was going on? Why was I so blind to what was happening right in front of me? And that answer is because we don’t know what we are supposed to be looking for until we know. And once we know then everything in the past becomes so obvious. The clues were all around us, we just didn’t know what we were looking at.

I told Jodie once again, I thought she needed to go to the hospital. She again repeated to me what she had said every time in the past, no, she was okay. She was bad, but not that bad, she would be okay, she didn’t want to go. I looked at her and said, I really think that we need to go someplace right now. She hesitated. I asked her if she needed me to make the call. She looked at me and nodded. I told her all she needed to tell me was how far she could make it. The drive to UC Davis is 4 hours. The drive to UCLA is 3 hours. The drive to our local ER is a 1/2 hour. She said she wanted to go to Davis.

By the time we got her into the car a few minutes later she told me she had to go to our local place. The drive was harrowing but I got her there safely. Once again, for the third time in two weeks, she walked into the emergency room. I parked and met her standing in the waiting room. She was able to check in finally and we got her into a wheelchair and began to wait. I honestly didn’t know if she was going to make it and I did my best to try and help keep her focused and present. Finally her name was called and we got her into the first triage station. Within minutes they called out SEPSIS ALERT and everybody started running around in a well rehearsed pattern. Jodie was whisked away and they had her in a bed, with IVs in both arms and connected to oxygen and all the sensors they had.

She then began to go downhill fast. All of her vitals began dropping. Everything was failing and nothing they were trying was working. Several times I had to walk out. They asked me if I had a problem with needles. I told them it wasn’t the needles. I was just going to completely lose it and I didn’t want to do that in front of my wife so I had to run outside. Three hours into the event, with Jodie being slowly titrated amphetamine to keep her blood pressure up, she regained consciousness, and more awareness. She looked at me and told me I had to go home. That I had to take care of me. That I had to take care of our dog. That I needed to leave.

The plan was to stabilize her to where they could transport her to a hospital that had a camera on their endoscopic equipment. There was nothing I could do. Jodie was right, I had to go, and so I left. Somehow I made it home. I took care of the dog and I went to bed around one in the morning. My phone range at one thirty but I didn’t have my ringer on. I didn’t get the phone call from Jodie calling me from the hospital to tell me that they were taking her to the airport. They were flying her to a hospital in San Jose. And then she was gone.

But I didn’t know any of that until I woke a few hours later around four and saw that I missed a call from the hospital. I listened to the message and decided that three hours had been too much sleep already. By ten that morning I had the dog at the kennel, the cats had lots of extra food, the car was packed, and I was off to San Jose.

I didn’t see Jodie until about five that evening. She was in the ICU. Lucky for me, I have had experience in navigating ICUs. Sadly my mom had major health problems when I was child and so I spent large amounts of time learning all about hospitals. It was still incredibly emotionally overwhelming to walk into an ICU room and find my wife lying in one of the beds fighting for her life.

For the third time Jodie was in the hospital. This time they had to begin by stabilizing her. She was admitted with jaundice, sepsis, and e coli. They got those items a bit under control and finally began testing to again determine what was causing all of her issues. The doctor finally came in and told us that he needed to do an ERCP. I almost lost my shit. We explained she already had that and that was what got her to where she was. They assured us that it was the proper procedure to follow. The concern was that Jodie had a blockage above her gallbladder and they didn’t know what it was. We said he had to use the camera. He said he would if he had to. We wanted more, but he didn’t have anything more to give us and he left, with all of us feeling a bit frustrated.

It took several hours. I waited in Jodie’s ICU room. I worked on knotting my friendship bracelet. It didn’t help much. Eventually they wheeled her back in and she was in a panic. She was really worried. She could barely speak and she was crying very hard. She was so worried that they found something horrible and that she was going to die. I gathered her into my arms as best as I could and I held her and stroked her and told her that she was going to be okay. I whispered to her that she was great and amazing and loved and that she was going to be okay. And I hoped that I was right. I had to be right. I didn’t know what I was going to do if I wasn’t right. So I had to be right and so I told her she was going to be okay. That I had her and she would be okay.

It felt like hours passed like that, but I know it was merely just a few minutes. The surgeon came into the room and said “I think I may have solved her problems.” He then explained that he did try the ERCP and did encounter some large obstacle up in her bile duct. He did indeed have to use the camera to see what was going on. What he found was a 2 CM wide giant impacted gallstone. He said that he used a laser and blasted it to pieces as if he was playing Asteroids. He then swept out all the pieces, scoped out the rest of the bile duct and found nothing else wrong, not even a hint of anything else that might be causing any problems. And so, he felt, crossing his fingers, that he solved her problems.

Two days later they removed her gallbladder as a preventative against this sort of horrific affair from ever happening again. Two days after that they released her from the hospital. They wanted us to stay in the area and Jodie was for sure not ready to travel. We stayed for about five more days before returning back home.

I am stunned with gratefulness for being able to have my wife by my side still. I am absolutely humbled with the enormity that is life. It is so precious and it deserves to be treated with the utmost of respect.

Love You

Love Yourselves

Love Your Loved