At last (sort of)!

Well, it’s good news, bad news. First the dye test
failed because I couldn’t find beets (this is not the US
and people are lucky to see a beet more than once or twice in a lifetime here. ) So I used red food-coloring (not ideal, I know, but I was determined to use SOMEthing). Unfortunately, the red food coloring got digested and no color came through the digestive process.

As for green soft blobs, this flush produced only a couple of very small, irregularly-shaped ones without well-defined crusts, and, as I say, everything was without any red color, so the test will have to wait until someone tries beets.

On the plus side, however, I got my first genuine, hard gallstone, and it’s a thing of beauty. It’s precisely spherical, the size, shape and color and texture of a fresh pea, with a perfectly smooth hard surface.
The only thing it shares with the 400 or so green softies
I got out on my first flush is the bile coloring. Actually, it’s VERY hard for me, looking at this real gallstone, to see how something irregular like a soft green blob would ever become a perfect smooth sphere like this.
If the soft green blobs do turn out in the end to be coming from the liver or gallbladder, then I think there must at least be different mechanisms by which stones form. My understanding is that the typical gallstone grows like a pearl, starting with a particle and slowly growing outward as bile & cholesterol build up.

In any case, the color test remains to be done, I’m afraid. Maybe I’ll have to grow my own beets.

The saga continues. Come on, beet-lovers, go out in that garden and start pulling.

Andy