Posted 3/11/2012 9:10 PM (GMT 0)
My main GI kept trying to get me to hold off on the surgery until March 14 (which is when my third Remicade treatment was scheduled for) and then wait another week to see if Remicade was working or not. I knew that the surgery was needed and kept pushing for it. I ended up in the hospital due to the amount of pain I was in, and I got the surgery consult I was hoping for and the CT scan I had been asking for. I am so glad that I did. This is the breakdown of what was done and found during the surgery. This surgery saved my life!
The surgeon found two perforated places, one in my colon, one in my small intestine. There was also a hole in my colon.
Part of my right ascending colon was removed. So was the ileum (the connection between the small intestine and the large intestine). The appendix is nearby so that was also removed. The ileum is where the Crohns ulcers were located.
Concerned about the bowl perforation in the small intestine, The doctor carefully inspected the rest of my small intestine to make sure there were no further perforations. He didn't find any.
There was a great deal of generalized infection in the pelvic cavity. It was heading towards life threatening sepsis, so the decision to do the surgery was the right one.
A number of two different kinds of adhesions were found. All adhesions are essentially scar tissue but the reasons they form can be different.
Some of my adhesions were what are called "loop adhesions". Thinking about how the small intestine is compactly looped in the gut, these adhesion's were bits of tissue sticking together loops of the intestines. In short the loop adhesions were sticking bits of bowel to each other that should not have been.
Non-loop adhesions had stuck my bowels to the back of the abdominal wall, to the back of my uterus and bladder. The bladder also had an abscess right above it, thus explaining the terrible pain when urinating for the last month. the doctor released all those adhesions and said he expects the uterus and bladder to heal well.
He knew about at least five abscesses in my gut before surgery. The rest were surprises. These were infected spots my body tried to contain by walling them off with adhesions. The infected pockets of abscesses were drained and the adhesions "released" (read, cut carefully apart).
Abscesses were not the only areas of infection found in my pelvic cavity. There was a lot of generalized infection that had also gotten entangled in my ovaries and fallopian tubes. Those areas were cleaned up as much as possible.
Because there was so much generalized infection the doctor had to perform an ileostomy. This means a small part of my small intestine is outside of my abdomen, connected to a bag. I will basically poop into this bag instead of the regular way for about three months until i have healed enough to have a second surgery to reconnect the small intestine and allow elimination to return to normal.
the doctor took a lot of extra time to irrigate the areas that had stuck together with adhesion's. This process is called lavage, but in layman's terms means a ton of irrigation, rinsing out with sterile salt water. Consequently for the next few days i have three small drainage tubes to allow the rest of that rinsing fluid to leave my abdomen. The small incisions needed for these tubes will heal up easily without stitches when the tubes come out. The reason for the lavage was to help my body heal up the adhesion spots as well as possible after surgery.
Originally i was scheduled to be in surgery 2.5 to 3 hours. I was in surgery for a little over five hours.