Two Month Surgiversary

Feb 01, 2009

WOW.  What an interesting 8 days this has been.  For those of you who remember my last post, I was being admitted into the hospital for dehydration.  What had started on being a 1 day stay, turned into 8.   I am going to post this because I want others to read my experience.  I hope it'll help if someone finds themselves in the same situation.

Quick Recap:  I was sleeved on 12/1 as a revision from a lapband.  I was in the hospital for 6 days after my sleeve, I couldn't really drink or keep things down, but finally had done enough for them to let me go home.  Around Christmas, I developed a stricture, and went back in over New Years and was dilated.  Since then, I still had problems drinking, and could only tolerate water.  Other than the nutrition given in the hospital, I had not had "food" or "calories" in 8 weeks.

Fast forwarding to Friday the 23 (I think that's the date I went in) after several painful attempts, they finally got an IV going.  I was so severely dehydrated, that my veins were hard to find, and quite frankly kept blowing.  That weekend was the "hydration" weekend.  My electrolytes were off, and no matter what they did, they couldn't keep my potassium up.  So Monday, same story, and my doctor comes in that night (he'd been at an Obesity Conference and I was being seen by his partner).  He says that he's going to do surgery on Tuesday and place stints in my stomach to try to keep it open.  Mind you, over the weekend they had done ultra sounds etc. trying to figure out what was going on.  Tuesday they take me into surgery (basically an EGD, but they put you under to place a stint) the 45 min procedure turned into 2 hours.  It was awful, I woke up feeling worse than I did after the original surgery!  Because he couldn't do the stints (kept breaking) he did another dilation.  Two more days of IV fluids (and some nutrition thing recommended by my nutritionist that I reacted to) they place a central line on Thursday.  AWFUL.  I cried the entire time.  Friday was better, they started me on TPN Thursday night and slowly I started feeling better.  Today I'm back home, waiting for home health to come and hook up my nightly TPN.  Apparently the dilation worked, because I started drinking water, and nothing has come back up.  I even ate some broth and jello.  For the first time, I felt full - not pain.

The long and short of it, was that the scar tissue from the band caused my sleeve to do a 90 degree turn.  So, instead of a smooth curve, my stomach turned, which was where the liquids were catching. 

My doctor is going to do one more dilation to double check the scar tissue from the band.  He's an excellent surgeon, and I feel very blessed to have the care that I've had.

Moral of the story is, when your body tells you things aren't right, they usually aren't.  It wasn't normal to spit up after having anything but water.  I lived like that for several weeks, thinking it was just an adjustment period.  It's not.

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