Bridget Nolan

It started at a kitchen table, not in a clinic. An hour after dinner a band of pain climbed up under my right ribs and sat there, and I stood at the sink convinced I had simply eaten something that disagreed with me. That happened three more times over a fortnight before I finally went in, and a scan showed a gallbladder full of stones. I felt faintly foolish for having argued with my own body for so long.

What I could not find, in the weeks that followed, was the plain version of what came next. The hospital leaflets were reassuring to the point of telling me nothing; the forums swung between people who barely noticed the operation and people whose lives it had upended. Nobody quite joined it up: why stones that had been silent for years suddenly meant surgery, why my surgeon wanted to do it through keyhole cuts rather than one big one, how odd the trapped-gas pain in my shoulder would feel afterwards, and whether I would ever eat a normal meal again without paying for it.

Ayushman Health is what I pieced together once I was on the other side of my own laparoscopic cholecystectomy, and a consultant general surgeon goes through every clinical claim before it stays. The patient’s view is all I claim: how that first week actually felt, how my digestion settled over the year that followed. The surgical detail is signed off by a consultant who performs the operation himself.