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in the recovery room alongside all the patients who had just come out of surgery. Dr Smith was grinning down at me.
    â€˜Gee Kel, are you all right? That was a pretty interesting way to start your first day. See, I knew girls shouldn’t do surgery,’ he joked again and walked away, chuckling and shaking his head. At least I hoped he was still joking. It was not the most illustrious start for a budding surgeon, but even after this small taste of the operating theatre, I could not be deterred. This was what I wanted to do. I got right back on the horse and returned to Dr Smith’s theatre for the rest of the cases that day and never went down again.

I heart gallbladders
    F or most surgeons, it is pretty easy to recall the first operation you ever saw and the feeling that it gave you. Getting to help Dr Smith remove the gallbladder that day (at least the small part I saw before I hit the deck) was the beginning of my love affair with that little sac of bile. Never let it be said that there was a gallbladder I didn’t like. Even after claiming the scalps of more than 2000 of them, I never get tired of taking them out. It is really relaxing and it sends me to my happy place. There is a reason I have been unofficially crowned the Gallbladder Queen.
    Myths surrounding the gallbladder and its removal are plentiful – probably more than any other body part. Old wives’ tales about gallbladder surgery, previously passed over the back fence, have been amplified by the internet. Just ask Dr Google and be entertained by the fanciful stories about home remedies for gallstone removal. Whenever I think I’ve heard them all, along comes someone with an even crazier idea that makes me smile. People do love to hold on to their gallbladders and often have to be really talked into parting with them. The most common concern is that because it’s there, it must be required for something. Sure it is – when it works. But when it is diseased, the gallbladder doesn’t do a darn thing, other than threaten people’s lives. I remind patients all the time that the body is built to do without many of its parts if need be. Kidneys, sections of the liver, the pancreas, most of the bowel and the appendix are all up for grabs. Life finds a way.
    My favourite question about the gallbladder is, ‘Will you be using a laser to get rid of my stones?’ I am not a Jedi Knight and I do not have a light sabre – well, not a real one, anyway. It is something I’d like to try but there are no lasers involved. I suspect if I used one, I might cut a hole in something I shouldn’t. Other people wonder why you can’t just pass a gallstone. ‘People manage to pee out the kidney stones don’t they?’ they ask. Unfortunately you cannot pass a gallstone unless it is very tiny. To get into the bowel, the stone must pass into the bile duct and then through atiny valve curiously named the Sphincter of Oddi. This process can cause blood poisoning or swelling of the pancreas and is downright dangerous. This brings me to the olive oil and lemon juice drinkers. There are many recipes available claiming that if a gallstone sufferer drinks these things in sufficient quantities, the gallstones will be magically flushed out of the gallbladder. The reality is that you can drink olive oil and lemon juice by the gallon and you might as well chase it with a head of lettuce because all you are doing is making salad dressing. A vinaigrette will not shift a stone, but it will help the person spend the night on the toilet shifting a bucket-load of stool. Finally there are the true devotees of this technique who tell me that they know it worked because they have found gallstones in their poo. I find this very interesting because it means that they have actually been sorting through their own faeces in order to look for them. We even have a name for it – ‘poo sifting’. If a patient insists that they have