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Mrs. du Toit Weblog

This site is inactive as of November 30, 2008.

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

OK Oops

This is a health/recovery update and may be a bit graphic.

Oops.

I had a really bad day yesterday (worst so far), but it was all my own stupid fault.  I had my first “blockage” and it was no fun at all.  (Scared the beejeezus out of me, it did.)

Since I’m still healing, I don’t have 100% feeling yet.  Added to that is the fact that my stomach is in a new place and it makes things difficult.

When I had my first surgery, the doctor sewed my stomach to my abdomen.  That was because back in the old days (before we invented fire), you had to use a feeding tube for the first six weeks after surgery (and no, that was no fun at all, but still worth it, given the grand scheme of things).  My stomach was pretty high up and fixed.  After the feeding tube was removed there was no reason to un-sew my stomach (plus, you can’t, without additional surgery).

So one of the things that made my revision more complicated was the fact that the doctor had to also un-sew my stomach from my abdomen.  It’s free-floating again, with all the other organs in the area (and the scars have softened where the blow hole used to be tight to the abdomen).

What that meant from a feeling perspective is that I didn’t know where my stomach was.  That might not seem like it would be as peculiar as it is, but you’ll just have to trust me on this.  I didn’t know that the feeling I was feeling was full, because it was so low and to the left.  I thought it was just another pain, along with the rest of the discomfort in the area (because of all the various laporoscopic entry points).

The stomach silver lining of all this experience is that I now know exactly where my stomach is and can differentiate the discomfort of entry wounds and too full.

Something I had eaten earlier in the day got stuck (a non-unusual complication of eating wrong the first few weeks from surgery).  It can require emergency surgery (through a tube down your throat) to remove the blockage, but I was so not wanting to go there.  At about 4:00 pm yesterday, I realized that the pain had gotten really bad (I was trying to work and was doing my best ignoring the pain to continue working).  I drank a few sips of tea and realized that I could not keep that down.  That meant one thing, and one thing only:  total blockage.  Had I recognized the feeling earlier in the day (and I think it happened at about 11:00 am), I would have not eaten another thing, until it was clear.  But I didn’t recognize the feeling, so I ate more on top of it, making the blockage worse.

So I threw up (that was a first and not as terrifyingly painful as I feared it might be so early in the recovery process).  Throwing up is one of the common side effects of gastric surgery.  Because it could be painful (and a bit dangerous) this early in recovery, I had been EXTREMELY careful not to have it happen.  It is a feature, not a bug, and is one of the ways the surgery is an effective behavior modification tool.  Pain/discomfort (including vomiting) is a wonderful teacher.  Trust me, when you experience pain from eating a particular thing, or eating a particular way, you don’t do THAT again.  It creates instant aversions to things you can’t do or shouldn’t have. 

But that didn’t solve the problem.  A few more sips of water let me know that, and I repeated the process for about six more hours, until I finally surrendered for bed.  Either the blockage would cure overnight or it wouldn’t. 

It was an awful night (long and uncomfortable), but about 4:00 am things got better, and I woke up with things gurgling and bzzing so I knew that things were moving again.

I scared myself and I scared Kim even more.  I won’t do that again.

I also realized that I’d been pushing too hard.  Working full time the week after surgery is just too soon.  I’ll talk to work today and see how I can scale it back a bit (they’re just fine with all of this, so I’m not worried about that).  I wanted to be able to be back at work this week, and I will, but just not full time.  THAT was stupid.

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