[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…
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.