I had mine out when I was 19. It felt like a knife or something going straight through me, right at my breastbone.
I was in summer camp with the Army reserves when my gallbladder blew up. I don’t know if it was incompetence or what, but I stayed in agony for days and they refused to admit me or even look at me when I went to the emergency room on the base. I tried to get somebody to take me to a civilian hospital but nobody would and I was too sick to drive. I went to the emergency room four times, the last time in an ambulance.
Eventually they got somebody relatively competent to look at me and then those bozos decided that I really was sick. Next thing I knew I was in a 40 bed ward full of other women. All I remember of that first night was that they kept waking me up and telling me to be quiet. Apparently I was screaming in my sleep.
The nightmare continued for 10 days. At first they were going to take out my gall bladder, but then they decided it was cheaper if they got me well enough to go home and have me pay for it myself. Before I left, somebody told me that when I was admitted I was so dehydrated they gave me a 50–50 chance of survival.
The moral of the story is make sure the person who’s working on you is competent! The Army doctors who would have performed the surgery were on summer camp just like I was- they were surgeons in civilian life too! That was not a comforting thought.
After I got home and had the surgery, I noticed that I could no longer eat a lot of foods, especially greasy ones.
For example if I ate some potato chips, the grease would float to the top of my stomach and it would come back up into my mouth. I didn’t understand what was going on, but it certainly was disgusting.
Since then I have resolved the problem by using digestive enzymes and betaine HCl with my meals.