Friday, February 19, 2010

Reinforcements

Hey guess what happened this week? It's totally surprising...NOT. My little nemesis the abscess popped again - no I'm not a broken record, I'm serious.

I felt the pain building, all the tell-tale signs. And by Tuesday night I knew it would explode by the end of the week. And low and behold, Wednesday morning I rolled over to get out of bed and I felt it. Bubbly puss trying to squeeze it's way out of a now very tiny hole. Oh the lovely ness of it all.

I have to say I had a very weird reaction, I got MAD. I mean TOed to the max. This kind of anger does not happen very often but when it does it sweeps over me fast. So I had the hubs take a picture and I set to work on writing Super Surgeon Dude a very stern and firm email with visual aid included.

The gist, I knew this was NOT going to heal on it's own. That I would not drive to SD to be examined and prodded and then told to be patient. Well you get the picture, I went all Al on him.

I got a one line email back, "Although I feel you and I need to continue to patient, I would like for you to come down for a joint appt with my colleague, Dr. British Accent."

Um excuse, me WE, who is WE. Don't see him hanging around with acute pain and nasty pus oozing out of his body, but whatever that's besides the point. At least he was bringing in reinforcements.

Turns out the appt was scheduled for the next morning, Thursday. And so I did what I had to do an called in my own reinforcements. JaniceM, my k-pouch mama, who has guided me through this process as someone who have been navigating the land of the K for 30 years. And on top of it, she's a tiger. I was a little afraid I was going to be ganged up on, so I knew I needed Janice to jump in as my k-pouch body guard.

So we trekked on down, AGAIN, and were ready to get some answers. As usual Super Surgeon Dude was his nice, to the point self. At first he said he didn't see anything, but then Dr. British-Accent came in and felt around for a second and said, oh here it is, I feel it (right above my stoma.) They then went all looky, looky and started poking around with their scopes and sticks and lights.

When all was said and done, Super Surgeon Dude agreed it was there and said this was the first time he'd actually felt it. Yes well of course, because all the other times by the time I've made it the office it had mostly drained.

Janice jumped in and said well how does an abscess heal that's been around this long, and Dr. British-Accent said cut it open and clean it out. Super Surgeon Dude was more conservative and was still sticking to his guns that we should maybe wait a little bit longer to see if it healed on it's own, Janice pressed him on a timeline and he said not to wait more than two more months.

But ultimately he left it up to me. To open it up, I would have out-patient surgery that would only take about 10-15 minutes. He would make an incision over the abscess which is just hanging out in the fat layer above the abdominal cavity, drain it and clean it out, pack it and leave it open to heal from the inside out. Of course he went through the risks, etc. But it seemed he had conceded just a bit that this wasn't going to heal, but tried to stick to his reiterate his be patient line too.

I think between Dr. British-accent's assessment and Janice's to-the-point but not rude line of questioning, we actually made some progress. If I had been able to get rid of it yesterday I would have, but that wasn't the case.

So I will be having the little bugger cut out of me, yeah! But I'm going to wait until my cute little niece makes her debut in this world, she's due March 2. I mean I've been living with this for four months, so what's a few more weeks. It would be just my luck that I would schedule the appt and be in there and little girl would decide that day was THE day. And I am not about to miss the most exciting thing that's happened in our family in quite some time.

So go ahead little abscess, have your fun for the next couple of weeks, because after that you are being forceable evicted. And that's that. See ya.

2 comments:

Hilary Meurer said...

Wow, I cannot imagine what you are going through. I hope this comes to a conclusion soon. How you stay so optimistic is beyond me! I get angry over silly little migraines!

Jennifer said...

LOL! I love it when you go all Al on someone (as long as it isn't me! :) Great job at being firm. And I would like to give JaniceM a BIG HUG for being your strong team mate. Soon this will be gone and it will be on to getting healthy!