[PSA] severe abdominal pain is not a forum question
I ignored escalating upper abdominal pain for four days because I wanted to know whether it was "normal" before bothering anybody.
It was not normal. I went to A&E on day five, lipase came back normal, and it turned out to be gallstones — which is a real thing, needed sorting, and was made no better by the four days of waiting.
The thing I want to say to the person currently doing what I did: you are not being sensible by gathering information first. Severe or escalating abdominal pain, persistent vomiting, jaundice or sudden vision changes are same-day medical questions. This community cannot examine you and would not want to.
best — the order this archive was captured in
Stickying this permanently. It is the post I link when I lock a thread, and it is better than anything the mod team has written on the subject because it comes from someone who made the mistake.
To be explicit about how we handle these: the thread stays up, speculation about the individual case gets shut down, and we point at real help. That is not us being unhelpful — it is the only genuinely helpful thing available to a group of strangers on the internet.
Gallstones with rapid weight loss are common enough that it should be part of the standard briefing and it almost never is. Rapid loss changes bile composition; the mechanism is not mysterious and the incidence is not trivial.
Mine came out at month 7 and I would still do the whole thing again. But I would have liked to know it was on the list.
nobody mentioned it to me either, and i had read this entire site. it is in the wiki now, which is at least a fixable gap.
added to the first-twelve-weeks page in the urgent-care callout after this thread. one of the more direct wiki changes we have made.
and worth saying: normal lipase does not rule out a problem, it rules out one specific problem. people read one normal result as an all-clear.
which is exactly what i did in the waiting room, mentally, for about ten minutes.
adjacent one worth flagging: my dizziness turned out to be a blood pressure med that was now too strong for my weight. also not a forum question, also fixed in one appointment.
the four-days-of-waiting bit is the part that will actually change somebody's behaviour. thank you for including it rather than just the outcome.
the instinct to check whether you are overreacting before seeking help is nearly universal and it is the thing that costs people days. edit: and it is worse for people who have been told they are dramatic before.
[removed by moderator]
Removed a reply speculating about a specific reader's symptoms. This is the one thing that is never allowed in this community, no matter how well-intentioned.
- 1Gallstones with rapid weight loss are common enough that it should be part…5 comments in this branch · started by u/gallbladder_gary