Post-Op Report

We're on Day 5 without a gallbladder and I feel pretty good, though my bellybutton is still not talking to me.

For reasons I truly can't explain, I went into this surgery thinking it was very small and minor and I'd be back at work the next day. Because of this, I had to do a lot of actual work on Wednesday between regular (if accidental) naps, but I course-corrected and basically hibernated all day Thursday. I think I was awake for 2 hours total that day. I took Froday just as slow, but I was awake for all of it and got to have a few friend visits to spice up the day. I woke up this morning feeling materially different than the last few days- no pain (my last pain pill was yesterday afternoon) and a general feeling of being less... fragile? tender? Just more solid.

In celebration, I spent a few hours catching up on work emails and then a friend brought me lunch and drove us to get our nails done! It really was lovely- my first time leaving the house since Tuesday morning when my belly button was assaulted.

To recover from my little field trip, I'm back in pajamas in my bed binging Love is Blind UK (so great), and thinking we should catch up on my life back before four new holes got cut into my body.

On Monday, back when I still had a gallbladder, I was off to work in one of my new outfits from Ayron.

And got dinner with a dear friend who is moving to Dallas from New York!

Also on Monday: Cora broke her arm at recess.

I love how she looks genuinely annoyed at her bones for letting her down. This third baby has shit to do, how dare gravity best her.

It's a fairly small fracture at the growth plate, so she's in a splint for 2 weeks. If she's still in pain by then, she'll need a real cast. On the upside, she really is feeling pretty good AND we hit our medical insurance deductible months ago so you know, bring on whatever medical expenses we were apparently scheduled for.

In other child news, I continue to violate teen texting rules. If it's not my accidental insistance on punctuation, it's my failure to respond with the appropriate amount of speed and enthusiasm.

Someday I'll learn all the rules.

Also before my surgery, which I may have wildly underestimated but did understand came with some eating restrictions afterward, James and I celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary a week early!

19 years of marriage! You guys, that's so many years!

I decided/hinted strongly that 19 years is rainbow Chanel. And look! It's the pair of earrings I fell in love with on The Real Real that I also maybe sent to James!

I love them so much. And they kind of go with the amazing shoes he bought for me a few years ago.

Love is rainbow colors.

This is the longest I've been awake in a few days, so I'm going to bed. I leave you with this picture someone took with my phone of me and Maggie. I am wearing the same pajamas. The continuity makes sense.

Night night!

PSA: Physicals & Gallstones

For someone who really does try to be relatively healthy, I feel like I come to you with a lot of PSAs. Like getting your dermatology checks for skin cancer, which I've somehow already had three times (2016, 2019, 2021, though nothing in the last 3 years!). I try to eat well(ish), I stay (relatively) active, I see doctors regularly, get my blood work done every year, and try to speak up when something is concerning me.

Which is why it was a shock when I signed up for an Executive Physical, expecting to get some helpful baselines for the future, and instead left with a referral to a surgeon to get my gallbladder removed as soon as practicably possible. As I waited to discuss my results in more detail with the doctor I was furtively googling "what is a gallbladder and what does it do?"

But first let me back up. One of my firm benefits is that it will reimburse partners for one executive physical a year. I kept putting it off, figuring I am relatively healthy and see quite enough doctors anyway (this was in the middle of all these issues). Then one of the partners I'm close to did his and strongly recommended it, so I called The Cooper Clinic in Dallas last November to make my appointment. And their first available spot was July 17, 2024. So, I booked that, and put it out of mind.

July 17th came and after fighting all month to keep the day clear of calls and meetings, I showed up at The Cooper Clinic at 7:30 a.m. in my exercise clothes to begin a day of learning all about myself. And you guys, it was incredible. It was one of those things where I felt simultaneously SO incredibly grateful I could receive this kind of testing and care, while also so mad that not everyone can. The inequality in healthcare in a nation with our resources is really a tragedy. But I was there, and I was going to get everything out of it that I could.

The day started with blood work and then meeting my internist who talked through the tests they generally do while getting an in-depth medical history to see if any should be added (like a bone density test when I mentioned my mom's struggles with osteoporosis). I was seemlessly walked through various rooms and doctors: an abdominal CT scan, the most thorough skin check I have ever received from a dermatologist who also mapped all my various little freckles or moles so they can be compared year over year, a dietician (so helpful!), an exercise test (so hard!), strength and flexibility testing, a thorough physical examination, and more that I can't remember. I learned so much and what I appreciated most was how you met with doctors in real time to go over your results, so everything was immediately put into context and presented in a very non-alarming manner.

I discovered my cholesterol is high, which was kind of a surprise. Over the years I had occasionally been on the high end of normal, but never outside the normal band like this was. I talked with the dietician about some simple changes to make and I'll get my blood work redone in 6 months. To my shock the results will go straight to that same doctor and then he'll call me to talk through it. My bone density was borderline low, so I'm adding more weight-bearing exercise and we'll retest that next year. My skin looked great (yay!) though there's a mark or two to keep an eye on. My exercise test found me in Excellent shape, which the doctor said is one of the greatest predictors of longevity. The only band that's higher was "Superior" so I'm working for that next year.

When we sat down to review my abdominal and chest CT scan, he said my heart was in perfect health (yay!) with a plaque score of 0, which is as good as it gets. My lungs, liver, and other organs looked great too. He kept reading and then his eyes got big and he said, "huh, I've never seen radiology use this phrase before:

"Patient's gallbladder is packed full of gallstones."

What?!

As I soon learned, the gallbladder is a small organ in the digestive system that stores and concentrates bile, a yellowish-green liquid produced by the liver that helps the body digest fats. When you eat, your stomach releases a hormone that causes the gallbladder's muscular lining to squeeze bile into the small intestine through the main bile duct. The more fat you eat, the more bile the gallbladder releases. Bile is made up of several substances, including cholesterol, bile salts, and water, and can form gallstones when the chemical composition of bile in the gallbladder becomes unbalanced by too much cholesterol (80% of gallstones are made of cholesterol; hmmm), bilirubin, and other factors like being female (great) and over 60 (not even close yet!).

In the paraphrased words of the doctor, sometimes gallstones are completely innocuous and regardless of what a scan shows, if the patient isn't exhibiting any symptoms, they usually don't take any action. However, mine was packed so full, they were very concerned about it turning gangrenous (as bad as it sounds) and/or trying to offload some of those stones into my digestive tract which would be very painful and require surgery anyway. Given how much I travel, he was also concerned something like that could happen when I'm away from home, which would not be great.

He expressed surprise I wasn't experiencing symptoms.

"Like what?" I asked.

"Oh, nausea, bloating, and digestive distress after eating, frequent feelings of heartburn, occasional intense stomach pain..."

"Oh I experience all of those things pretty often."

[glare from the doctor] "You didn't write any of it down on your intake form!"

"It never occurred to me those things could go away."

In the last few years I have never left the house without Pepto chewables, Pepcid pills, and gas pills in my purse. These always fixed whatever I felt, so it never occurred to me I could prevent them entirely.

And so, I called the surgical referral my new internist gave me. I met with her a couple weeks ago and she agreed the gallbladder needed to come out asap. I scheduled the surgery for this past Tuesday and was generally told this would be a simple surgery: laparoscopic, small incision, quick recovery, no prohibition on exercise or really anything, just to get up and walking and do whatever I felt comfortable doing. Great! I thought. I've already had the hysterectomy, this will be a breeze. I'd take off surgery day, do some calls from home on Wednesday, and be back in the office on Thursday for a presentation to a Board of Directors.

Except no. No, of course not.

The surgery was supposed to be 45 minutes but went well over an hour. My gallbladder was the largest my surgeon had apparently ever seen. It took "a lot of tugging" to get it out. I have a picture of it cut open once it was outside my body and the sheer volume of bile and gallstones is insane. My poor belly button, which started with a 1/2" incision, ended up with a 2" (!!!) incision, and my 3 other incisions were tugged on more than usual and my whole belly is swollen and tender and mad. (Note: the tiny scar in the bottom left corner of the picture is from the tubal and hysterectomy surgeries, which is more what I was expecting to see when I woke up yesterday!)

Needless to say I was NOT on my calls this morning and I'll be doing my board presentation from home tomorrow. I have slept a lot. Ice packs help the swelling. I wake up on my own every 6 hours for my next pain pill. Milo has once again stepped up as a nurse and takes his duties very seriously. I can't eat anything with fat for about a month while my body adjusts to not having a gallbladder, and it's probably a good idea to not go crazy with fried foods ever again, not that I really ever did, which is again why all this was so surprising.

So in the last calendar year I have had three abdominal surgeries: a tubal ligation and ablation, a hysterectomy, and now a cholecystectomy. Add in two c-sections and my mid-section looks like it's been to war and I feel like it blames me. But I'm excited to feel better, deeply grateful for the opportunity to have the opportunity for such a thorough physical, and glad that I've already scheduled my 2025 appointment.

In the meantime, Milo and I will be cuddling, I will be icing and taking my medicine, and my family will keep checking on me and giving me gentle hugs while they handle everything else that needs to be handled.

Days 8 & 9: Grand Teton and Home

It's happening! I'm finishing a travel blog! I've also published more blog posts this month than I've managed in a few years, so huzzah to me. It helps when you don't do much each day so it's mostly just posting pictures and talking about how beautiful everything is.

Speaking of, here we are at Day 8!

The day we explored our last National Park! Number 3 on this trip and number 19 as a family. We'd driven through Grand Teton on our way from Yellowstone to Swan Valley, but we weren't able to stop and explore.

We started our last full day of vacation by, you guessed it, sleeping in! Once awake and dressed, our first priority was breakfast. My friend recommended Butter, in Victor, for brunch and it was INCREDIBLY good. It was also on the way towards Grand Teton, so that seemed like enough of a plan for the morning - off we went!

Those cinnamon buns, I dream of them. The food was fantastic. We ate everything and more and I wish I could go again tomorrow.

At brunch we made the next part of our plans for the day by asking the wait staff for their favorite hikes at Grand Teton and if there were any that could possibly involve jumping off rocks into water. We'd been thinking about String Lake or Jenny Lake, but after getting input from our waitress, we settled on Phelps Lake with its promise of a big jumping rock and fewer people.

We parked at the Laurance S. Rockefeller Preserve Center and learned more about how this great man used his wealth to further a legacy of conservation stewardship.

He is a big reason there even is a Grand Teton National Park and the nature center is a neat stop. It's also where you park to begin your hike to the Phelps Lake Jumping Rock.

It started raining on our hike. Luckily not too heavily, since we didn't have umbrellas or raincoats, but we did get wet and it seemed to send the few other people we saw heading back towards their cars.

We passed our usual bear warnings. I enjoyed that this one encouraged us to fight back if the bear was not discouraged by our bearspray or attempts to play dead. Luckily we didn't have to put any of those potential responses into action.

After a couple miles of fairly flat hiking along the lake, we came to a very big rock!

We went behind a little copse of trees to change and next thing we knew, James and Landon were flinging themselves off it.

The water was crystal clear and absolutely beautiful. Cold, but not the frigid ice water of Glacier.

The girls swam a bit first and then Claire took the leap.

She spent a while trying to convince Cora, who was not at all convinced.

I decided it was time for me to jump. So I did, twice!

Each time I swear I'm going to keep my arms down by my sides, but no, off I go like an incredibly awkward flightless bird.

I do always land with my arms by my side though. I learned that lesson young and growing up in the Rice family which also likes to jump off things into water while on vacation.

Still, I feel so graceful flying in the air. It's a genuine shock to me everytime when I look at the pictures and see them flapping about at the start.

The water really was lovely.

Cora did eventually jump! She balked and retreated many times, and after she did finally jump she told us she was glad she did, but also told us she was not doing it again. Boundaries. Cora has them.

James and Landon jumped lots of times and then went for a swim, while the girls and I swam and sunned on the rocks.

After everyone had jumped and swam their fill, we changed back into our regular clothes and hiked the 2 miles back to the car. We drove back to our beautiful borrowed home one final time, through the mountain passes and tunnels, and stopped at the Swan Valley General Store for a few dinner items and get an order of the square ice cream we'd been meaning to try for three days. We made dinner at the house, hung out, and tucked ourselves in bed, feeling very good about our adventures in our National Parks.

On Day 9 we still got to sleep in since our flight wasn't until 1 pm out of Idaho Falls, only an hour drive away. We packed our things, ate up the rest of the food through some creative brunch ideas, and slowly drove away. The Idaho Falls airport is teeny tiny and our flight home was smooth and easy. As reported, things got a little more complicated once we took the shuttle bus to our remotely parked car only to discover James's battery was dead, but now that all feels hazy and long ago. What feels bright is the cool mountain air, the spectacular views, the wild animals, the gorgeous water, and the number of things we got to jump off into the gorgeous water.

I took a few pictures with my real camera before leaving it at home because we kept constantly jumping into water. But here's some better pics of some wildlife we saw early on, on our Grinnell Glacier hike day!

And finally, here's our own animal who was at a boarding place while we were gone. She had lots of fun and slept for three straight days upon her return.

All in all, our MT/Wy/ID National Park trip was really wonderful and I'd recommend it to anyone. That part of the country is so beautiful and we are so lucky the National Parks have been preserved for us.

Back here in the real world, I just got back from taking Cora to the ER because she fell onto her wrist at recess and has a minor fracture. I am having surgery tomorrow, because despite promising my belly-button she was done being cut into, this is something I seem to do every quarter. This time they're removing my gallbladder, so now I'm done a uterus, fallopian tubes, and a gallbladder and I'm wondering if they should just grab the appendix while they're in there so I can SERIOUSLY not have my poor stomach cut into a millionth time in the future. Anyway, more on that surprise drama after a sufficient amount of the anesthesia leaves my system. On the kid front, Cora was sick for most of last week and is now VERY stressed about catching up on her schoolwork with a broken right wrist. Claire is learning how to study and do homework; I am not allowed to offer advice and will have no further comment on how it's going at this time. Landon is finally no longer swollen from his wisdom teeth and is anxiously awaiting his updated class rank. Maggie's stomach ache appaers to be gone and the cats are excellent.

See you again when I'm down a gallbladder!

Day 7: Idaho, Land of Potatoes and Waterfalls

On Day 7 we woke up late and lazy in our temporary estate in Swan Valley, Idaho.

It was delightful. We played shuffleboard, laid around, did laundry, I caught up on a few work emails (the only time I opened my laptop on the trip, which was INCREDIBLE)... I think we finally decided made a plan for the day around 11 a.m. The plan first involved eating lunch, so James ran to the Swan Valley General Store to get some sandwiches, and once those were eaten, we headed to Fall Creek Falls! A spot my friend recommended, that internet promised we could swim at, and that google maps said was less than 15 minutes away.

You guys, I don't know what is in your head when you think about Idaho, but mine mostly goes to potatoes. And I mean that as a compliment. I LOVE potatoes. All potatoes in all forms, they are possibly my favorite food.

But turns out Idaho is also basically Costa Rica.

I mean look at this!!

We thought it was a short walk from the road to get down to the falls, but turns out it's more of a "use a rope to scale down a small mountain in your sandals" kind of adventure.

Then you wandered through some marsh and very tall grass and then bam, a secret resort. In Idaho.

Other than really wishing we all had water shoes, which is hardly the secret resort's fault, it was perfect.

The moss on the rocks was soft and surprisingly grippy. The water temperature was cool and perfect. The were secret pools and waterfalls everywhere.

We climbed and explored and swam. For $0 and some sunscreen.

Landon picked up a pet snake but we made him put it back.

We got back home in the late afternoon, showed and rested, and then headed back to Jackson Hole for dinner at the pretty fantastic Gather restaurant we'd made a reservation at the night before.

We ordered all the appetizers and Landon liked the pork buns so much he ordered two more rounds as his entree. I had an elk bolognese that was insanely good. We loved everything.

It was such a nice evening. We walked all around, exploring shops and buying t-shirts.

We drove back home at sunset, watched a movie in the game room, and went to sleep. It was our simplest and one of our favorite days.

Idaho! We love you.