I’ll precede this with I’m not being a dick since everyone on here is so touchy about shit anymore.
Actually, it is usually not the swelling that causes the pain. It is the actualy constriction. When you have stones or “sludge” and you eat a fatty meal, the gallbladder constricts to inject extra bile beyond what the liver produces to help break down the extra fat being ingested. The pain comes in when the stones or the sludge is trying to pass through the bile duct and it can’t. The pain doesn’t subside till the gallbladder stops contracting trying to push the stones or sludge through and it settles back into the gallbladder, which is usually after you are done digesting the meal or the body states that it doesn’t need the extra bile. Your liver produces bile for normal digestion.
When you get an ultrasound you can actually see the stones falling around when you roll on the table if they are big enough. If you have sludge then they usually can’t see it which is what happened with me. I went from eating shitty foods, to eating healthly and exercising. Initally dropped about 85 lbs. The gallbladder wasn’t getting discharged so all the cholesterol and Bile started to make “sludge” and it got to the point that the couple times I had something like wing night, or an italian hoagie, the gallbladder tried to deliver the extra bile and nothing was coming out of it and I ended up in pain.
The bad thing about when it is sludge and not stones is it is harder to diagnos. I had an issue where my pain would start 3 to 4 hours after I ate. Finally after 3 months it did it 10 minutes after I ate at work and they took me right down to the ER. The one doc I worked with had just been discussing with me a week ealier about how my symptoms were on the fence with it being my gall bladder or not. Well he was the one working the ER that night and he ran and grabbed the dilaudid and doped me up.
For the pain, it was the worst pain I have ever felt and I have a very high pain tollerance. It was like someone grabbing your right flank and sqeezing the shit out of your insides, yet you couldn’t pin point where the pain was coming from.