Gallbladder Soup

As a follow up to my last post I need to share with you a recipe from gallbladderattack.com. It is called "Green Soup" but I think of it as gallbladder soup. It is recommended to help avoid gallbladder pain and relieve pain. Not to be used when in the middle of an attack, it is more useful to help clean out the system and ease the "load" on the digestive system.

You have never tasted freshness like this. While all of the veggies in it are season it tastes especially good, so even though I've not been having GB pain, I made it last week for fun. SO GOOD! I add extra water to the recipe and a pinch of salt.

Strange Validation

About a month ago I started taking piano lessons. As a singer- who hopefully will do something with the TWO degrees I have in music someday- I decided that it was important for me to get my piano skills up to snuff so that maybe I could consider teaching as an option. Lessons have been going well and my piano teacher is a very interesting person- kind, loving, and always looking for an opportunity to teach. She obviously spends most of her time with young children, and that is clearly her expertise. But, she works just fine for me so if she teaches me like she would a six year old, I'm okay with it so long as I'm learning.

At my lesson last week, she shared with me that after my lesson the week before she ended up going in to the hospital for emergency surgery. Apparently she was driving down the road and all the sudden had massive pain on her right side. Gallbladder. Of course, when she got to the hospital they immediately took her in for surgery and took it out. I wasn't surprised- even though she did not have stones or a previous history of gallbladder attack- as this is the protocol hospitals and "regular" doctors follow. She told me she had never felt better in her life and had not had any pain since.

The red light when on in my head.

While I was happy to hear she was having such great success after a week, I warned her the majority of gallbladder removal patients still have pain after surgery and to watch what she eats carefully so as to avoid any other potential flare-ups. She dismissed my warnings and assured me that she eats a healthy diet, avoids dairy, and eats all organic for the last few years.

Okay. I guess.

I was excited for her apparent returned health and thought perhaps she was one of the small portion of gallbladder removal patients that does not have continued pain after surgery. Yet, looking at her, and listening to her, and knowing that they removed her gallbladder when there were no large stones (only small minuscule ones) I still wondered if there wasn't something else going on with the liver. Nonetheless, I was happy she was feeling so good.

This Monday I showed up for my piano lesson at the scheduled time. She wasn't there. I thought perhaps I went to the wrong location as this was the week were supposed to start doing lessons at her regular studio instead of her house. The receptionist at the church thought it was odd that she wasn't there, wasn't like her to not be there for a lesson. We called her on her cell. She was in the hospital.

Gallbladder flare-up.

She told me that at 2 AM she had gone to the hospital because she was in such severe pain and had been there since. She apologized profusely for not being there, and I assured her it was okay and that she needed to concentrate on getting better.

I left the church, got in to my car, and it hit my like a ton of bricks. What strange validation? The path I chose- the path less followed- was right. I am doing the right thing. I have saved my health and my gallbladder. Had I listened to that doctor just over one year ago, and had my gallbladder removed, I would have been in the same situation as her-- wondering, "why am I still in pain? Why has it not gone away?"

This is the second time on my journey that I received such validation. About two months in to it, right after I started working for my chiropractor/acupuncturist, we had a patient with almost the same exact story. Had the surgery, and two weeks after gallbladder removal she was in as much, if not more pain than before. I can remember the pain in her voice and the confusion she had as to why it still hurt so much. I had told her about the gallbladderattack.com website before her surgery and urged her to follow it's advice, but she had brushed it off because she had already chosen to have it removed and that was going to be the "answer" for her. When I talked to her those two weeks later, I told her about the website again and she eagerly wrote it down. I haven't seen her since, but I can only hope that she did go to the website and follow its advice. Doing that saved my health, and taking that path has made all the difference in my life.