In which I face another surgery
| date | 2024-06-12 18:05 utc |
|---|---|
| topics | health; orig. on PostHope |
| note | This post was simultaneously published on PostHope, where it’s still available, along with several public comments. |
A year and a half after the “Big Surgery”, I gave conference papers in Leeds (in July) and in Birmingham (in August), with several weeks of research at the Bodleian Library in Oxford bridging the weeks between the two conferences. On my last day in Leeds, and throughout my first week in Oxford, I had some pretty intense pain in my chest. This, I found out later, was my transverse colon and greater omentum forcing their way up through my esophageal hiatus.
Lots of folks have hiatal hernias:
The exact prevalence of hiatus hernia is difficult to determine because of the inherent subjectivity in diagnostic criteria. Consequently, estimates vary widely — for example, from 10% to 80% of the adult population in North America. 1 1 Roman, S; Kahrilas, PJ (23 October 2014). “The diagnosis and management of hiatus hernia.” BMJ (Clinical Research Ed.). 349: g6154. doi:10.1136/bmj.g6154. PMID 25341679. S2CID 7141090.
But basically only us lucky folk who have had esophagectomies end up with their colon in their chest — and it’s only a lucky 10% at that. 🙄 As I reported in the posts I linked to above, I had my colon put back where it belongs in December of 2019.
But some of those lucky few find that the problem recurs, erm, recurrently. And in October of 2020, history repeated itself.
This time, my surgeon gave me the opposite advice. Rather than suggesting (emphatically) that I rectify the situation ASAP, he advised that I put a further surgery off for as long as possible — since apparently if the problem recurs once, it is very likely to recur frequently. And we don’t want any more surgeries than necessary.
And so, with the recommendation that I schedule another surgery “when the pain becomes too great” or I am “too short of breath,” I returned to post-cancer life as “normal.”
But now there’s even more colon in my thorax, and I’ve been advised that I should take care of it before I end up in the emergency room. Sigh.
So once again I’ll be returning to a clear liquid diet in a little over ten days, and showing up on June 26 for a 3+ hour surgery, and at least one overnight at the hospital — two nights are likely.
And once they determine that I don’t leak, they’ll send me home to another two- or three-week gradual progression from clear liquid to soft-food to more-or-less normal diet, and eight weeks of not lifting more than 10 pounds.
I’m not terribly worried, but I’m less optimistic than before — because it’s harder to believe that I won’t have to do this yet again in 2027 and again in 2030 and again.…
I’m posting this both on the PostHope blog where all my cancer-related posts have gone before (and all of your loving and supportive comments!), as well as on my regular personal blog, which I hope will ultimately become an exhaustive collection of my non-professional posts from over the decades. (This explains the long list of back-dated posts now available here on erikmh.org.