The Gallbladder Attack That Sent Me to Hospital: My First Attack, the Indigestion Mistake and the Diagnosis

The attack that finally sent me to hospital was my fourth in a fortnight: a deep, gripping band of pain high under my right ribs that came on about an hour after a curry and would not settle, and it took a scan finding a gallbladder full of stones to end two weeks of me insisting it was just indigestion.¹ This is the plain account of that first attack and the ones that followed, written so you might recognise yours sooner than I recognised mine.

I am the patient here, not the surgeon, and this piece is the one I most wanted to read while I was still arguing with my own body. If you want the clinical anatomy of what an attack is, gallbladder attack symptoms sets it out properly; if you want the wider picture of the stones behind it, start with what gallstones are and why they form. This is the honest, first-person version.

What was the attack that sent me to hospital?

It was an episode of biliary colic: a steady, intense, gripping pain high in the upper right abdomen, brought on a couple of hours after a heavy meal and lasting long enough to frighten me before it faded. Biliary colic happens when a gallstone temporarily blocks the narrow outlet of the gallbladder, so the organ contracts against the obstruction instead of emptying².

The pain sat under my right ribs like a clenched fist and did not care what I did about it. I tried standing, walking, lying down, a hot water bottle, an antacid; none of it touched the ache. What I remember most is how solid it was, holding at one constant level rather than coming and going in waves, which is exactly how biliary colic behaves despite the word colic. After a couple of hours it drained away and left me shaken, tender and certain I had simply eaten something that disagreed with me.

Why I spent a fortnight blaming indigestion

I mistook it for indigestion because the pain sat precisely where heartburn and a pulled muscle sit, high under the ribs, and it followed a rich meal, which is the single commonest way a first gallbladder attack gets dismissed. Gallbladder pain is felt in the upper right abdomen or the centre of the upper belly and often spreads to the right shoulder blade or the back, so it overlaps neatly with far more ordinary complaints³.

It did not help that I wanted it to be nothing. It is remarkable what you will tell yourself when the alternative is a hospital. I blamed the curry, then the wine, then eating late, then stress. Each explanation held right up until the next attack arrived after a completely different meal. The fatty-meal link is real, because fat signals the gallbladder to squeeze and squeezing against a lodged stone is what generates the pain, but no meal is reliably safe, and that inconsistency was part of what kept me guessing for two weeks.

The attacks that kept coming back

The attacks came four times over that fortnight, each a few hours after eating, each lasting from a few minutes up to a few hours before fading, and that recurring pattern was the clue I kept ignoring. Attacks tend to recur rather than strike once and vanish, and once stones are causing them the yearly risk of a complication runs at roughly 1 to 4%⁴.

By the third one I had stopped pretending it was random. There was a rhythm to it now: a good meal out, an hour or two of ordinary contentment, then the familiar band tightening under my ribs while everyone else finished pudding. I found out later how common my stones were in the first place. Around 10 to 15% of adults have gallstones, more often women, and the rate rises with age, yet roughly 80% of those stones never cause a single symptom³. Mine had clearly crossed over from silent to loud, and I was slow to admit it.

What finally sent me to hospital

The fourth attack was the one that did not ease on my usual timetable, and the combination of pain that dragged on and a low, feverish unwellness was what finally overrode my stubbornness and got me assessed. Pain that lasts beyond a few hours, especially with a fever or shivering, or any yellowing of the skin or the whites of the eyes, is a warning that an attack has tipped into a complication and needs same-day assessment⁵.

I had genuinely not understood, until that night, that a gallbladder attack could become something more serious. Prolonged pain with fever can mean the gallbladder has become inflamed and infected, jaundice can mean a stone has passed into the main bile duct, and pain boring through to the back can signal pancreatitis. I was lucky: mine settled before it became any of those. But it was the fear of not knowing which one it might be that finally sat me in a waiting room instead of at my own kitchen sink. If you want the detail on the inflamed gallbladder specifically, it is in acute cholecystitis.

The scan and the diagnosis

The diagnosis took about twenty minutes: an ultrasound of my upper abdomen showed a gallbladder full of stones, and two weeks of guessing turned into a plain answer on a screen. Ultrasound is the usual first test for gallstones because it is quick, painless and good at seeing stones in the gallbladder, and blood tests are done alongside it to check the liver and look for a blocked duct or inflammation¹.

There is a particular relief in being believed by a machine. The sonographer turned the screen enough for me to see the bright specks casting their shadows, and I felt faintly foolish for having spent a fortnight arguing with something so obvious. It was not indigestion. It had never been indigestion. It was a gallbladder that had been quietly filling with stones for who knows how long, and one of them had finally started getting in the way.

What the diagnosis meant next

Being told I had symptomatic gallstones meant the conversation moved almost straight to removing the gallbladder, because once stones are causing attacks the definitive treatment is to take the organ out rather than to keep managing the pain. NICE recommends laparoscopic (keyhole) cholecystectomy for people with symptomatic gallstones, including anyone who has had biliary colic⁴.

That was a jolt. I had walked in braced to be told to eat less fat and go home, and instead I was being talked through an operation. It made sense once I understood that silent stones are usually left alone but symptomatic ones carry that steady yearly risk of trouble, so watching mine was not really watching, it was waiting for the next attack. The full account of the operation, the recovery, and life afterwards sits in the guide to gallbladder removal.

What I would tell myself before that first attack

I would tell myself that a gripping pain under the right ribs after a fatty meal, coming back more than once, is a gallbladder until proven otherwise, and it is worth a scan and not a fortnight of excuses. An attack is simply the moment stones that had been silent for years stop being silent, and recognising it sooner spares you the guessing².

I do not think dismissing the first one was foolish; almost everyone does, because the pain genuinely mimics indigestion. What I would change is how long I kept dismissing it. A pattern of pain after rich food is the clue, and one good scan answers the question that two weeks of antacids never will. Once I was on the other side of the operation, the recovery held its own surprises, and I have written that just as honestly in my gallbladder surgery recovery.