It’s a Girl

By the numbers, Delphine is a pretty special baby. At her four-month checkup this week, the Plumpster was off the charts for weight, busting the scales at 17 pounds, 6 ounces. She already has the distinction of belonging to the select club of breech babies; we jokingly call this the Five Percenters, since only 3 to 5 percent of full-term babies are breech. And now she’s put her mom into another unpleasantly special category: the up to 12 percent of pregnant women who develop (or develop problems with) gallstones during pregnancy. Like Groucho Marx, this is not a club you want to join.

The culprit? Pregnancy hormones that slow down the gallbladder’s usual functioning, increasing the risk of developing stones. But while 12 percent of pregnant women sounds high — and the complications of having gallstones, once they start passing out of the gallbladder, can be fatal — nobody in the maternity world seems inclined to put that PSA out there.

None of the pregnancy or new-baby books we read mentioned gallstones as a risk factor. Neither did our childbirth-class teacher, nor the moderator of our drop-in parenting group. And nobody in my family has gallstones. If asked, I would’ve said, “Gallstones? Isn’t that the sort of thing that old geezers like Sir Walter Scott used to get?”

So when, in early July, I started having nighttime attacks of upper back pain and nausea, I chalked it up to new-mommy stress. Not until the attacks started happening frequently, and then not going away at all, did I start to think, “Gee, maybe this is something serious.” Even then, the three doctors we consulted all shrugged and said, “Well, maybe it’s your gallbladder.”

We finally hauled the family off to the ER and did a variety of scans, which the Doc Cottle-esque attending doc looked at briefly before announcing, “You’ve got a whole bagful of stones.”

Bag lady, that’s me.

We met with a few GI docs after that, who nodded sagely and said things like, “Oh, we see someone in your situation — a new mom with gallstone problems — at least once a week.” And hospital nurses eager to show off their own gallbladder laparoscopy scars, who agreed that moms with gallstones was very common.

Apparently the medical mnemonic for gallstone risk factors is known as the 5Fs: fair, fat, female, fertile, and forty. This means that overweight Caucasian women around the age of 40 who’ve had at least one baby are at higher risk for developing gallstones.

In other words, me.

Rapid weight loss — such as the 22 pounds I dropped in the first few weeks after having Delphine — is another risk factor. So is using oral contraceptives. And if you’re Native American, Chicano, or just plain old, you’ve got risk factors for gallstones, too. Just so you know.

Plenty of folks have gallstones that don’t do anything; they just sit there, rattling around inside the gallbladder. But once the stones start passing out of the gallbladder into the intestines, they can cause problems. Best-case scenario? You pass the stones without feeling them. Worst-case scenario? The stones get stuck and infected, and you die.

The standard medical treatment is to have the gallbladder surgically removed. Other treatments focus on diet and supplements to ease the stress on the gallbladder and dissolve the stones. But by the time I figured out what was wrong with me, I had run out of time to try less invasive options.

So now, in addition to my C-section scar, I have four other scars dotted across my belly. I look like the victim of a drive-by. I kinda feel like one, too.

For those who believe that having a baby means your old life is over, let me tell you: Forget about the baby. Having gallbladder troubles is truly the end of your old life. Because while you can live without a gallbladder, it’s not exactly an unimportant organ; its job is to help digest fats. Having a tetchy gallbladder, or having none at all, means that you simply cannot eat fats the way you used to.

Unlike people who try to eat low-fat diets because they believe that dietary fat goes straight to the hips, or straight to the arteries (both questionable propositions), people with gallbladder woes have no choice: If they don’t eat a low-fat diet, they get sick. And since fats, frankly, are what make food taste good, a troubled gallbladder (or none at all) means no more bliss in the kitchen.

When we got home from the hospital, I threw out the old grocery list that had been sitting around from the previous week. Ice cream? Pâté? Bacon? Sure, I can still eat these things, in very limited quantities. But I won’t be eating them for a while, and I’ll never be able to thoughtlessly enjoy them the way I used to.

The upside? Not having to worry about developing gallstone problems during any future possible pregnancies. Because while surgery for gallstones is no picnic, surgery while pregnant is far, far worse.