The big bad op.
Well it’s been a very long time to reach this point and my biggest fear going in was that they would find nothing and I would have to continue with the pain and discomfort and medical people staring at me saying we don’t know. On check in at Anglesea hospital it felt like I was going to an 80s office block with carpet chosen not to show vomit or other bodily fluids.
Needless to say this didn’t give me a whole lot of confidence but they reassured me that as a laparoscopic procedure this would be fast and I would just be staying overnight. The surgeon told me they would be checking for blockages and adhesions and the gynaecologist was just removing ovaries and a small 9mm cyst. Both were giving the impression that if my Rotorua surgeon hadn’t requested this investigation they would not really bother with it.
Fast forward to the next morning – the op was extra long, I have 6 incisions and the 9mm cyst was actually 5cm and attached to the sigmoid colon and they spent almost an hour detaching it. The Meckles diverticulum was in a condition that it had to be removed and part of my bowel resected. The adhesions were so prolific the whole small intestine had to be stripped. Both surgeons told me I really needed surgery and it was just in time, as it was major surgery I stayed 4 nights and I am now on a 6 week recovery program. Being allergic to everything they struggled to find any painkillers that worked for me, ended up overdosing me on oxycontin and ketamine and still had nothing that really reduced the pain. It has taken me till now to start to feel normal and my vision is slowly returning. After the overdose everything was blurry. It’s going to be a slow journey, I am on a very restricted diet and every time I do anything I have the consequences which makes it feel like one step forward and 2 back. But I am on the other side of it and I hope that once the swelling goes down I may be able to wear normal clothes again and be able to bend without taking three days to recover.
I feel very very lucky and so grateful that my surgeon here ( who was Barney’s surgeon and has become a friend) kept pushing for the investigation, without that I didn’t fit any of the diagnoses, the inside of my gut was perfectly healthy so no one could figure out why I was in so much pain and so distended. The answer for the last 4 years was just wait and see how things go as I got worse and worse.
My surgeon had told me that the symptoms of what he thought was going on were catastrophic bowel blockage and death, thank goodness I didn’t have to wait for the symptoms to finally have this dealt with.
The Traveling Kiwi 