Hemicolectomy

A follow up to a question I posed last week and received helpful responses.

My GI thinks my left sided pain and bloatedness may relate to me not being in an active flare but more that the scarring he saw in the left colon from the bad years of active colitis is so bad that motility in the bowel is comprimized and it may never return to normal.

I know CD patients can have sections of their small intestine removed due to scarring....has anyone had parts of their larger intestine removed while still having it connected in some way to the rectum?....i think its called a Hemicolectomy

I have never met a GI doctor or colorectal surgeon who is open to doing colon resection on UC patients. The reason is that the UC will just spread to the healthy re-attached pieces. Surgery is a major burden on the body and they won't take out a small piece only to have to take out the whole thing later... so they just take it all out at once.

If you can get into remission, scar tissue can be softened over time through various methods. I would not get you colon removed because of scarring. However, if your scars are causing strictures, then that is suspicious because normally that is a feature of Crohn's. UC is not transmural.

I agree with nssg. That's interesting your doctor said it could be due to scarring though. How long did you have active UC flares? I wonder if I have scarring too because often my stools are very narrow, like pencil-thin even if I'm not having many or any other symptoms. I've asked my GI about the narrow stools and he didn't have much to say about it.