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A Twisted Ankle and a Long-Awaited Answer
I sprained my ankle in November and solved the three-year mystery of why I got so sick after having surgery to remove my gallbladder.
Yes, you read that right. Twisting my ankle while turning around — in bare feet completely sober on a totally flat floor — is how I uncovered the reason I’ve hurled hundreds of times in the past three years.
I had emergency surgery to remove my gallbladder in 2017 and the recovery did not go well. In fact, you could say it was non-existent.
For four months after having surgery, I vomited every single day. I threw up at work, in metro stations, at the grocery store, and on two separate vacations. Waves of nausea stopped me in my tracks at all hours of the day.
My throat sometimes burned for days and I started taking ulcer medication just to protect the lining of my esophagus. I unintentionally lost 70 pounds and my hair started falling out.
I had an ultrasound of my remaining bile ducts, a CT scan with barium contrast (it was banana-flavored and disgusting), a colonoscopy, a gastric emptying scintigraphy, and an upper endoscopy. I had dozens of blood tests and mailed off a stool sample. That week I couldn’t stop singing “it’s my shit in a box” to the tune of that one particular Lonely Island song.
