I am super high on Percoset right now, I took my last two tonight. I think I will need a refill. I hadn't taken any in a couple weeks, but I finally gave in and finished the bottle. Healing pain has been excruciating the past few days. It takes eight weeks, supposedly, and it has now been four.

I guess what this is is all the scar tissue around my liver, just stabbing away at me. It sucks. It reminds me too much of what this was like before the surgery.

Anyway Percoset really does the trick, while giving me a dreamy sleepiness that is nice for a quiet evening at home watching Olympics sorta.

Tonight I talked to Brian about all the stuff I remember from right after surgery. It seemed like only 10 or 20 minutes from waking up to leaving the hospital, but it was more like two hours. It felt very much like a dream to me. I don't remember the nurses' faces, or what the recovery room looked like. I felt like my eyes were closed half the time. I remember that I was so glad to have my husband there, because I felt so helpless.

alright goodnight now.

I spent several hours on the sofa this morning, propped up on two pillows, under a blanket, with Sasha on my lap and Kona next to me, watching the Price is Right and Martha Stewart, while kind of passing out.

I love you, percoset.

But seriously this pain thing is getting old. Yes, I know I had surgery only six days ago. Really really looking forward to feeling normal and energetic again. Being able to run around with my dog, stuff like that.

The doctor told me I would miss a week of work, I don't know why I didn't believe her, but turns out she was right.

Our nice neighbors invited us for dinner last night, we ate on their back porch. I was in a lot of pain, the percoset hadn't kicked in quite yet, and my appetite has been tiny, so I only ate a small portion of food. The grilled turkey was sooo good though. The weather was lovely. I announced it was Brian's birthday, and Cindy happened to have some cherry cake for us to celebrate. Nice, and low-key, how Brian likes it.

We went home, I was all loopy and went right to bed. The pain continued, but the meds put me to sleep. It was warm and Brian had the fan on. But I woke up in the middle of the night absolutely freezing. I had to wake Brian and ask him to pull the duvet over me -- sitting up is really hard. Then I got up anyway to shut off the fan. My teeth were chattering. My poor body would rather be warm than cold.

I got up at seven, wide awake, ate half an apple and popped more percoset. I drank some coffee on the couch and watched CBS Sunday Morning. Got a little high, and took a few naps. At 8:30 I decided to go out on the back porch with Kona and read a book in the morning sun. It was so peaceful.

This afternoon I finally get to bathe. I feel filthy and my skin is starting to itch, all over. I last showered on Friday morning. My incisions look gross, I really hope they do heal well, as promised. We'll see how it looks when the scabs fall off.

I think the pain is finally beginning to subside a bit. There is still gas pain in my shoulder, which is weird, and abdominal muscle pain, but it's a bit less than before. I think I will finally feel well by Tuesday.

The gall bladder is a peach-pit-sized organ nestled beneath the liver. Its purpose is to temporarily store bile passing from the liver into the digestive tract, which is then used to aid digestion of fat.

When more fat is consumed, more bile is produced.

The gall bladder should function by "pumping" bile at a steady pace. When someone has gallstones, the path into the biliary tree is blocked, causing pain.

In my case, there are no stones, however, from time to time, the flow of bile decreases to a weak trickle, and the bladder begins to fill up, expand, and push up into the liver, like a bloated water balloon.

The liver, sitting just under the lower right ribcage, leans into the ribs, causing pain as the gall bladder becomes distended.

This goes on for weeks. Eventually, something causes the gall bladder to drain like it's supposed to. It could be having a beer -- I had a pint on Sunday and the next day I felt fine. Who knows. But I know I'm not cured. The thing just doesn't work.

You know when your car has a problem, where it runs poorly or makes a noise for a week or so, but then it's fine again, so you put off getting it fixed, but then the problem returns? Cars don't fix themselves, nor do lazy gall bladders.

So mine is coming out on Friday. This evolutionary throwback will be removed, and the bile will flow directly from the liver into the intestine, with no pit stop along the way. It is a common surgery, yet I am still nervous, having never been cut into in such a way before, nor put into a deep sleep in this way. There will be scars. Small ones.

Good thoughts will be much appreciated.

My sonogram was normal, but I still think my pain is from my gallbladder. What other tests can I have to check my gallbladder?

The sonogram finds almost all gallstones. If these tests are normal, you probably don't have gallstones. Most gallbladder pain comes from gallstones, but a few people have pain without gallstones. In these cases, the gallbladder hurts because it fills and empties poorly or because it contains bile crystals, which partially block the bile passages.

You may have an Upper GI endoscopy with duodenal drainage to check for bile crystals in the gallbladder. You may also have a Nuclear Medicine hepatobiliary scan with gallbladder ejection fraction to check gallbladder filling and emptying.

What is a hepatobiliary scan with gallbladder ejection fraction?

This test shows the liver, main bile passage and gallbladder. The Nuclear Medicine technician first injects a small amount of radioactive dye into a vein. The dye collects in the liver, then travels through the bile passages to the gallbladder and small intestine. Dye should collect in the gallbladder. If it does not, the gallbladder is blocked. Gallbladder surgery will help.

If the gallbladder fills with radioactive dye, the technician gives a Kinevac injection to squeeze the gallbladder [which then produces tons of nausea]. A scanner measures the radioactivity leaving the gallbladder. This shows how well the gallbladder empties. A gallbladder that empties poorly can cause pain. Gallbladder surgery may help.

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I haven't heard back from the doctor yet with test results, which I spose means whatever is going on isn't life-threatening, but I'd like to know if I need surgery or what. During my test, the ol gall bladder did take a rather long time to fill up.

The shot of dye traveled from the vein in my wrist to my liver in two heart beats. Thump thump. Thump thump.

I lay on the metal table and looked up at the screen, where my liver was represented by hundreds of tiny moving dots. It looked bigger than I expected, but they are known to be large.

The machine above me, filled with geiger counters, detected the presence of radiation in my body.

I watched the dots. They moved like a hand-drawn cartoon of a liver-shaped swarm of fireflies. The dye began to move down into my gall bladder, my duodenum, my small intestine. It drew the outline of my guts on the screen. A nebula of stars, shaped like organs, on a black sky.

One hour passed. The doctor passed something from the IV into my body: a synthetic hormone which mimics a signal from the pancreas. Within thirty seconds I was nauseous. Within three minutes my stomach was doing backflips. He stopped the drip and told me I'd get better in a couple minutes. Sure enough, I did. Mostly.

We waited for my gall bladder to drain. It looked like a little golf ball above my intestine. My liver was dark again -- having expunged the dye. I stared at the screen, only twenty minutes left. It didn't change much. It began to look like a drawing of a woman in a dress, maybe standing at a butter churn, with my gall bladder as the scarf on her head.

When it was over, I put my shoes and sweater back on. I went to the car and drank water, then drove to the store to buy muffins and orange juice. I wondered if later on my body will produce anything that glows in the dark.

You guys I want to be all excited about the house and everything but really all I can think about is how I am still sick, how I have barely eaten anything since Monday, how I am going to the doctor in 20 minutes. I am just worried about what could be wrong with me. I hope it's just a faulty gall bladder and a bit of stomach flu on top of that. And not anything worse.

I can't wait for this pain in my ribs to finally stop. I don't even like wearing a bra anymore -- the underwire feels like it's cutting into me.

I felt so sick this afternoon, so after finishing a couple big tasks, I left at three and headed home on the 3:45 ferry.

Brian picked me up. He brought me green tea in a travel mug.

I lay in bed as soon as I got home. Slept for a while, then woke up just after six and lay there feeling sicker and sicker. Just awful stomach pains and cramps. I also had a low fever.

As an aside, I am pretty sure I have gallstones and need gall bladder surgery. So I wondered if this was the big one, if my appointment for march 11 would just not be in time and we would have to go to the ER tonight.

It went on and on. I hadn't eaten anything since noon, about eight hours earlier. I took a shower and washed my hair. Finally I sighed and told Brian maybe we should just go to the hospital.

Then, after brushing my teeth, I got that special feeling you get when you know you're going to barf. And I did. A lot. Violently. It was of course wretched. I kneeled there spitting into the toilet for a while, looking down at the mostly digested contents of my lunch.

I am never ever going to that deli on Yale again, btw.

I cleaned myself up and told Brian I was going to chill and see if this was what I needed, if it was just "mild" food poisoning. He went to the store and got me some ginger tea. I talked to my friend Sean on the phone (he had his gall bladder out recently).

Anyway, I still feel a little bad, but nothing like how I felt before. I can still feel the gall bladder twinging just below my right ribcage. I sorta dread the fact that I'll have to be operated on for that. But not tonight. We're buying a house tomorrow. I can't be in the hospital tomorrow.