Well, my world did a little flip-flop this week.  I was going to write a column about my return from vacation and the mapping system I used to get there, do a little traveling around and return home.  However, the Wednesday after returning home I ended up at Rockingham Memorial Hospital for a three day visit.

I won’t get into all the details but let’s just say that I woke up very early in the morning with a horrific, intense stomach pain which didn’t quit for many hours.  Now, I have never had a baby, but let me tell you, if this pain was anything like that, earth’s population would be greatly diminished if it were left up to me. 

Now the point of the column.  I found out that I needed to have a laparoscopic cholecystectomy. Wow!  Big words!  So, after returning home I wanted to find all the information about the surgery that I could.  What I did was go to Google.com and type “laproscopic gal bladder removal” and hit enter.  It immediately came back and wrote, “Did you mean: laparoscopic gall bladder removal?” It caught my two misspelled words.  I clicked that link.

That link showed me that there were approximately 479,000 links to that subject.  Me, being kind of simple minded, clicked on the first of those links.  That link took me to FamilyDoctor.org and I immediately noticed that “gall bladder” was actually “gallbladder”.  I went and checked a couple of the other sites too and they all agreed, so, HA HA Google didn’t catch all my errors!

I then found that it is actually called “laparoscopic cholecystectomy” as I stated before.  Well I got to read more about gallbladder removal than I had ever known and probably more than I want to know.  I saw pictures of ugly little gallbladders and incisions (just like mine).  I really appreciate modern medicine.

So, as usual, using the internet you can find more information than you can imagine on any subject.  Just give it a try.

Enough of my adventures.  But, before I go, I really want to thank the nurses in 500, East for the great help and care they provided me last week.  And the doctors of Harrisonburg Surgical Associates for the great job they did.  Now if I could just get rid of the slight pains that don’t allow me to sit at my computer for more than 20 minutes before taking a break, that would be great!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.