Monday, March 13, 2017

Consultant Outpatient Appointment – 3 February 2017



In February 2017 I saw one of the surgeons involved in my case again and was told that I would now need an open surgical procedure to repair and review the original surgery. This would be very major surgery involving a vertical abdominal incision and could not be done laparoscopically. They would also repair a small umbilical hernia that I had acquired over the past year. I wasn’t sure how I felt, but I made it clear that this would need a long admission and that I would need a High Dependency bed having needed ITU in the last surgery, and apparently gone ‘screaming’ into ITU and needed sedation in the form of Midazolam to ‘shut me up’ – these memories only recently recalled were as raw as the horizontal scar on my abdomen from the last surgery. I felt my body shudder as the flashbacks of my grotesque and fat and swollen belly post-op and vomiting bright green liquid. I then thought about the more practical matters of weeks off work, loss of income and clients and having to go through a repeat journey of very traumatic surgery. I also reflected on how much longer I could also cope with having to live in toilets, the need to keep going, and also far more personally to any such romantic life – if I was ever to have one – knowing that this regular bowel obstruction was adding pressure to my bladder and vagina and just how unsexy it would be to describe to any such lover that sex might be difficult and that I would need the toilet a lot of times each day, not to mention the risk of soiling of white underwear. The prospect of all of this was extremely unglamorous, but if the surgeons felt they could repair me yet again and it would hold, that I would consider going through a few weeks of pain and unpleasantness for the chance of a radically improved quality of life.

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