In October of this year I almost lost my father.

He lives with us and on a Friday night (pizza and movie night) we as usual had pizza for our evening meal.  That night my dad went to bed early. I went down to check on him Sat. morning and he had been sick all night. He had vomited about six times in the night and proceeded to vomit again while I was with him. I wanted to take him to the doctors but he insisted he was already feeling better. He had a temperature so we all thought he had a stomach virus as they were going around at the time. I made him chicken noodle soup, gave him Gatorade, orange juice and ginger ale.  He slept through most of Saturday.

On Sunday I heard him downstairs and ran down to see how he as feeling. He was dressed and ready to go to work. He is 78 years old and still works three days a week but Sunday is not one of them.  He had lost track of time and thought it was Monday.  I fixed him some oatmeal, which he ate, gave him some juice and told him to go back to bed. He said he was feeling much better.

I cancelled work for him on Monday because he still seemed to weak to go to work. I wanted to stay home with him but he insisted that he felt better and he would be fine. When I got home (thank God my tutoring was cancelled or I would not have been home until 5:30) he was sweating profusely and very weak. We took him to the ER immediately. After many blood tests, CT scans, sonograms, EKGs, X-rays, etc. they found that he was in atrial fibrillation, kidney failure, fluid in his lungs, pancreas shut down, jaundice, and gram negative rods were found in his urine and blood just to mention a few problems. I could not believe this, as my dad is only on aspirin 81mg and runs circles around me normally. People often mistake me for his wife so he looks younger than most 78 year olds (maybe I look older than most 52 year old females). He was in the hospital for over a week when they (about 20 different doctors saw him because all the different systems were involved) decided the whole array of problems stemmed from an infected gall bladder.

He went to surgery 7 days after admission and we were hoping they could do a laparoscopic procedure to remove the gall bladder. The surgeons took him in at 1 pm. He finally came back to his room at 7 pm. They had to cut him because his gall bladder was so full of pus they were afraid it would burst open and cause more problems. Two days later he was no longer in atrial fibrillation, his blood sugar had gone down, his lungs were clear, his kidneys were working again, he no longer had gram negative rods in his urine or blood, and he was no longer jaundiced. Who would have thought that the insignificant gall bladder could cause so much damage and nearly kill a normally healthy man?