Did you miss me? I’ve been in hospital again. I wouldn’t say I’m cured but I feel better than I have for eighteen months because at last I know what is wrong.
I knew something was wrong ever since I went back into hospital after the hysterectomy, vomiting blood. They kept me for eleven days, said I was all right and sent me home. Nothing happened until the following November. Then the same thing occurred, this time they said I had Norovirus. What I really had were doubts.
On to this year. In March I had the problem, stayed at home, slowly recovered. Same thing in April. May I turned up in hospital with it and was sent home. Then again on Thursday. I went to A&E and was sent home where I went straight to bed, do not pass go do not collect £100. Ooh I felt ill. In total that had been 7 times since the surgery and it was the same every time. I felt ill. Over the next six hours my stomach swelled until it looked as if I had swallowed a wok, then I vomited what looked like copious amounts of blood, at least a litre, then I felt better.
This time the OH went next door and consulted the neighbours.
My neighbour just happens to be the orthopaedic surgeon (legs) for the local hospital. He has saved me twice now. The first time when he told me to wait for the good surgeon to mend my broken arm and this time when he made a diagnosis without even seeing me. He said it sounded like a pseudo blockage, to go back to A&E and what to say. Reluctantly I got out of bed, packed a suitcase and dragged off to A&E and said what he told me to say. I was eventually admitted, having spent the second lot of five hours on the hard metal seats in A&E in two evenings, by one o’ clock I was on a ward and at two in the AM I was wheeled down to the scanner and scanned and finally it was revealed that I had adhesions from the original cancer surgery that were stitching up my intestines with strings of twizzled up scar tissue, so that nothing could get through, certainly not large quantities of fibre such as the little box of coconut that I had eaten on Thursday morning while I had done my emails. So everything backs up including all the digestive juices, which I keep producing in an attempt to wash it all past the blockage until it all comes back up again and I feel better.
Quite why they hadn’t spotted this, which is, apparently, very common and a side effect of keyhole surgery, given that when the OH looked it up on his phone the description of the symptoms was exactly me to the letter, I cannot say. Two GPs didn’t spot it, a medical team in A&E didn’t spot it and hospital doctors on three occasions didn’t spot it. None of which matters because my neighbour did and the scanner confirmed his diagnosis.
Now what happens is that we wait to see if the matter resolves itself. If it does not or gets worse I finally saw, in hospital, the good general surgeon (good as rated by my neighbour) who will sort me out surgically if it gets worse. I have a follow up appointment in three months to see how I’m doing and at last, for the first time in eighteen months I have stopped worrying obsessively because I know what is wrong. For a year and a half I have feared that the cancer was somewhere else in me because swelling up like a balloon and vomiting occasionally simply is not normal.
I had fears immediately after the operation when the surgeon told me she had done five exploratory keyholes before giving up and going in through the old scar. If you poke five holes in someone’s stomach, that’s five potential problems. When she saw me before the surgery I was concerned because she looked very cold and not very well. I asked if she was all right and she looked at me in surprise. Perhaps first thing on a cold January morning is not the best time to find what you are searching for through a small hole, it’s like doing the bran tub at the local fair last thing on Saturday afternoon, what you’re likely to find is bran and the small packet of chewing gum that earlier visitors rejected.
Saved by the neighbour, as usual round here amazingly, I now know what to do, I shall take serrapeptase, which can dissolve scar tissue, I shall eat small wet meals, drink a lot of fluids and get on my vibration plate to work out. Above all I shall be glad that finally I feel as if I am back to having a future. I shall also get on with plotting the second novel, the characterisation of which I nearly completed in hospital. (Of course, sick as a dog, but still writing.)
First I am going to make a thank you card for my neighbour and thank him thankfully, where would I be without him?*
*Dead with a broken arm.
###################################################