If you’re looking for the stereotypical university experience, you came to the wrong door. Imagine a casual Friday filled with fun and excitement waiting for the weekend to begin so you can live your last days before midterms. Then, imagine my face the next day when I woke up in a pile of my own sweat, my stomach churning, and two seconds away from vomiting on my bed.
That’s how my gallbladder’s decline and my midterm season nightmare began. Let me preface by saying that I didn’t do a single thing right throughout any of this. Now back to the story. It was so perfectly timed that the very last week of September I had what I thought was food poisoning from eating meat at the dining hall. I later found out from my doctor that it was probably the last straw in the coffin for my gallbladder.
But the irony of this all is that I had three midterms that week, so you can only imagine the massive headaches I had throughout the week from stressing over midterms to stressing over whether I had a burst appendix and was on the verge of death. Luckily, all my tests were spread out over each other, so my first one was Monday, then Wednesday, and I ended the week with one on Friday. On days when I didn’t have a test, I could study. Whereas on days I had a test, I could lay in bed and attempt to forget about all the sharp pains stabbing my stomach.
Being sick during midterm season is one thing, having a gallbladder full of tiny gallstones is another. I can’t recall a day during that week when I didn’t throw up in the bathroom, lay on my dorm floor for long periods at a time, or cry on the phone to my mom and dad. It got so bad that on Friday, my parents made a plan to drive from LA to Berkeley at 6 p.m., getting to Berkeley at 12 a.m., and then drive me all the way back to LA to go to the ER. I know, I have the best parents in the world.
One thing led to another and pretty soon I was having surgery to remove my gallbladder, get a shunt placed in my body, and eating chicken broth for two weeks. And while all this was happening and I was in LA for a month on bed rest, school was very much still happening. Turns out leaving out of the blue on a Friday night signals your roommates and RAs into thinking you might be dead. On top of that, I was easily failing every class I was taking, including my online class. And even though I bounced back, my 3.1 GPA surely didn’t.
On the bright side, I have a great icebreaker for future classes and a scar right in front of my stomach that will prevent me from wearing see-through shirts.