#cholecystitis

That's not how it actually works. Eating a very low fat diet is more likely to cause gallstones. (Gallstones are statistically linked to fatness because guess what size of people are more likely to be dieting?)

Bile is used in your digestive system to digest fat. It is stored in the gallbladder. If you stop eating fat, the gallbladder never gets the signal to squirt out bile and it builds up in your gallbladder, eventually concentrating and forming crystals or gallstones.

Then let's say you go to a party and eat a donut. Suddenly the gallbladder is called back into action and tries to squirt out bile, but instead is squirting out tiny rocks and you are experiencing the worst fucking pain of your entire fucking life.

Your doctor tells you to avoid eating fatty food, so you assume fatty food caused this problem, but that's not really what happened. The fat triggered the noticable symptoms, but there is very little evidence linking high fat diets to the actual formation of gallstones.

If the hospital is busy, how long is a patient allowed to be in severe pain until it warrants more meds (I've heard of morphine being used).

Cholecystitis (inflammation of the gallbladder, often related to gallstones) is a very common reason for abdominal pain. In fact, about 10-20% of Americans have gallstones, and about 1/3 of those will at some point have cholecystitis because of them.

Cholecystitis is very similar to appendicitis, just instead of the opening of the appendix getting blocked, the opening of the gallbladder does. About 90% of cholecystitis cases occur when a stone gets lodged in the tube that carries bile from the gallbladder to the small intestine.

While the pain is described as being abdominal, there is a lot of referred pain associated with the gallbladder, often in the shoulders, back, and chest. This can make it so that the person coming into the emergency room initially complains of pain in one of these areas.

If someone comes in and says their chest hurts, the hospital has to rule out something serious- like a heart attack or PE- before they can move on. Usually this involves taking bloodwork, doing an EKG, taking an X-ray or CT of the chest, and if anything comes of that, giving morphine and/or a beta blocker to reduce workload on the heart while setting up to go to the cath lab to remove the clot or place a chest tube.

If it's gallbladder pain, nothing is going to come of this- it's all going to come up normal, so they'll start working on other things. Usually this involves more bloodwork and more physical exam, as well as a CT of the abdomen.

The quickest and cheapest physical exam way to tell if someone's pain is caused by their gallbladder is to press straight down under the patient's ribcage on the right side, then tell the patient to take a deep breath. As the person breathes in, the diaphragm pushes down on the liver, which sandwiches the gallbladder between the liver and the examiner's hand, which hurts so much the person usually can't take the whole breath. This is called Murphy's sign.

As for how often the person might get pain meds- on a floor 2-6 hours depending on the med is standard- and they'll have to ask for them each time because of how they're ordered. In an emergency room, they're probably going to be lucky if they get them once, since in the ED, med doses are typically ordered individually.

Trust your body. Your pain, sickness, and fatigue is real, even if your signs and symptoms don’t match up to the norm. 

I went into the ER this past November 27th because I had excruciating pain in my abdomen and radiating into my back. I couldn’t focus on anything but my pain, and no medications or at-home treatments helped.

I had cholecystitis. It’s inflammation of the gallbladder (the organ that stores bile and releases it into your intestines) caused by a gallstone blocking the duct that leads into the intestine. My gallbladder was twice its normal size. (And I had surgery later that night to have it removed.)

The pain in both my chest and back, as well as my other main symptoms (nausea and vomiting) are super duper common. However, another symptom that a lot of people have is pain in the upper right of their chest as well as tenderness to the touch. 

Because I’m autistic - because my brain is wired differently and receives pain signals and interprets them differently - I never had that symptom and that might have sped up my initial diagnosis; both in the ER and in previous “gallbladder attack” episodes I had (which I thought was just bloating/gas pains).