Two and a half-ish years ago (late February 2024) I had emergency surgery to remove my gallbladder. I had been meeting with a nutritionist about my digestive issues for a couple years (after trying to figure diet improvements out myself ), and working my way through tests and specialists trying to hunt down the source of my issues: H. Pylori test, low FODMAP+ elimination diet, trying to regulate my cortisol levels better, taking a proton pump inhibitor, probably more I don’t remember… Turns out, I just had atypical symptoms and/or described them poorly, which made me skeptical* when I finally got the diagnosis.

I do think someone ought to have referred me to a gastroenterologist years earlier. (This was building up for a long time — looking back I had a memorably bad attack in October 2019, but that wasn’t the first one. The doctors I talked to before said it sounded like IBS.) The gastroenterologist dx’d me using an abdominal ultrasound right away — I had lots of gallbladder sludge.…