31 staples

So as I was discharged from the hospital last week, I thought it might be a good opportunity to put in a few words finally about the state of my health. 

Now before anyone jumps to any apparently obvious conclusion, it could be said that it actually isn't as bad as it might otherwise seem. Of course, it's conceivable that anything could have turned out slightly or even significantly worse than it actually did, so the point may be trivial. But this possibility aside, by all appearances I am beginning to make some significant progress past the horrendous ordeal that began the very early hours of Friday the 16th of February, a little over two weeks ago now. With even greater accuracy it might be said that the ordeal began over 20 years ago, and has been ranging in intensity of unpleasantness from total remission to unrelenting agony and most everything in between during that time. The last few weeks have unfortunately been largely defined by the agonizing species. What started as intractable gastrointestinal distress in the middle of the night concluded with a major surgery the following week to remove 6 (six!) small bowel adhesions which, over time, had effectively narrowed certain sections of my intestines, making it difficult or impossible to pass food through them. Adhesions of this kind are unfortunately an all-too-common complication that can ensue from the type of bowel surgery I had nearly six years ago, during which my entire colon was removed. This became necessary due to the presence of a longstanding chronic disease called Ulcerative Colitis, which some of you may have heard of. It's far from uncommon, and along with the closely related Crohn's disease it affects a significant number of people from many walks of life all over the world. In the more severe cases, such as mine, the only way to effectively "cure" the disease is to surgically remove the inflamed and damaged tissue, leaving behind the remaining healthy parts to assume all digestive function. This might be done for more than one reason in fact: for me, the risk was not only the ongoing manifestation of dangerous and debilitating colitis symptoms, but left untreated this condition entails an enormously high risk of developing colon cancer as well, which can be quite fatal. So the only real choice, if you can even call it that, was to have whole damn thing chopped out. That was in May of 2018. My life has not been the same since, to put it mildly. 

Now, in reality, no one's life is ever the same since anything, if you catch my meaning, but again, we will put this aside for the time as it merely illustrates the magnitude of difference here. Little did I know that my life was about to get even different-er all over again, with the length of my new scar far exceeding that of the original incision to remove the offending organ in the first place. It's quite long indeed; in fact it may even approach the size of some C-sections, but turned the other way 90 degrees, straight up and down. Actually the wound itself is healing up very nicely, and the amount of pain from it has often been overshadowed by ghastly gastrointestinal discomfort as my poor innards begin to "wake up" from being totally shut down by the blockage and the surgery both (the medical term for this is an "ileus"). At first it was pretty excruciating. But after a few days of taking stool softeners and simethicone along with my regimen of heavy pain meds, my guts began to move freely at last and I began to expel vast quantities of formerly trapped gas and so on, and I began to feel much more comfortable. This will probably sound familiar to many people who have had a major abdominal surgery of one kind or another. It will likely be up to another week or two until my digestive function returns to something comparable with what I'm used to. 

At the same time I am dealing with a lot of muscular fatigue and bruising due to the disruption of the abdominal wall and the attendant alteration in muscle usage across the midsection. There is also a lot of ugly skin stretching and discoloration in connection with the staples (yes, there are 31 of them, scheduled in theory to be removed tomorrow). I'll try to keep readers posted on my recovery. In the mean time, it can be a lot of effort just to get through the day, which is practically the extent of my capability at this point. Other things will again become possible in due course. 

Thank you for your patience.