On Friday, March 11th, 2022, I awoke in the middle of the night with a feeling like I had pulled a muscle in my abdomen. So I rolled onto my back and tried to relax. But the discomfort persisted so I got out of bed to walk it off. After just a few minutes of walking, and as the pain intensified, I realized this was no muscle spasm. I knew exactly what this was. 

It was a gallbladder attack! My first in 10 years.

I retreated to a spare bedroom so I would not wake my family, and there I spent the next 5 hours in agonizing pain. The physical pain was awful, but so was the mental anguish. 

In the decade since I self-healed my gallbladder attacks, the paranoia that they might one day return had completely vanished. For the first few years I was very careful, and always a bit nervous when my diet would slip. But I have been living such a normal life for so long since, I truly had begun to believe it was over for good. In fact, the only time I ever think about my gallbladder now is when I get a comment on this blog.

So to have all the pain come rushing back, and the trauma of the difficulty involved in managing frequent attacks, and the hard work of stopping them, all made for a difficult night.

I’m not sure if it was coincidence or fate, but just a few weeks ago my brother-in-law was having some digestive issues and my family shared Keeping My Gallby with him. This caused me to reread some of my advice here, so it was actually fresh in my head.

During the worst of the attack, I ate some cold, raw cucumber just to have something in my stomach, and then began drinking lot of water. Then I took a long, hot shower. Fortunately, I had access to a shower with good water pressure. 

It is amazing how much the hot water and pressure directed right at the gallbladder, on both the abdomen and the back, can make the pain disappear. 

Unfortunately, the moment you get out of the shower, the pain comes rushing back and you are right back to where you were. In agony. But it does work. For me, nothing eases the pain of an immediate attack like a hot shower stream hitting the area of the gallbladder.

So why do I think it came back now, and what am I going to do about it? Stay tuned. In the next few posts I’ll cover my thoughts and give my perspective, a decade later.

It’s amazing this happened on what is essentially the 10 year anniversary of this blog!