Results from Surgery

I had my surgery on 4/6.  I was in the hospital 6 days and am just finally now feeling like returning to the land of the living and writing about what happened.  My GYN/onc. got in there and immediately checked the type of cancer I had with a biopsy, and sure enough, it was a return of my UPSC which I had 7 years ago.  It was the same mass he'd checked for a period of a year with repeated scans from 2014-15, the one he'd said couldn't be cancer because cancer always grows and this hadn't.

The cancer had wrapped itself right around my ascending colon.  He called in a gastro surgeon and they both operated on me.  They did a resection of my ascending colon which went up into my small intestine.  They had to remove the ileocecal valve, which is the valve between the small and large intestines, in doing this.  I'd been feeling for years like my incisional hernia repair from my first surgery had failed, but I had multiple different doctors check it out and none could feel a hernia.  Well, it seems the small intestine grew into the mesh placed in me during my 2012 hernia repair and got all tangled up in there.  They had to do another resection of my small intestine at that spot to get the whole mess out.  So now I have two sections of intestines that were cut apart and stapled back together with titanium staples after removing the bad stuff.  The gastro guy then "built me a whole new abdominal wall" with a newer infection-resistant mesh.  So now the mesh is in the abdominal wall where it shouldn't get intestines stuck in it any more.  I forgot to mention that with the cancer wrapped around the ascending colon, they also found the cancer growing into the muscle and toward the bone of my right hip.  They removed what they could, but they couldn't get it all out of the muscle.  I had a lot of pain getting my right leg in and out of bed after surgery, and it still isn't pain-free yet.  Chemo and possibly radiation will be done to try to get the rest.  Last summer, I got numbness in my right thigh. I went thru a neurological work-up where the neurologist concluded that I was wearing clothes that were too tight.  He said it would go away in about 6 mos. if I stopped doing whatever I was doing to irritate the nerve, but it hadn't gone away by the time of surgery. I asked my GYN/onc if the mass could be pressing on the nerve, and he told me he'd seen it happen before.  Apparently, that is what happened. He told me if he operated there, I'd be numb for life afterwards.  In a way, that's good as I can't feel the Lovenox shots I have to give myself there every other day.  I also was having really bad muscle cramps in various sites around the body, especially my legs, for several years.  I had started seeing a neurosurgeon and was getting epidural pain shots for back pain.  He told me to take potassium either in pill form or  to have a banana every day to get rid of the cramps.  I took two and then three potassium pills plus a banana and still had the cramps. Interestingly, the cramps are gone after the surgery. 

Now, I'm dealing with trying to get my bowel function going properly.  The day I went home from the hospital, I had black diarrhea 5 times before I left.  My GYN/onc had warned my husband that the diarrhea could persist for the rest of my life and I might be on Immodium for it all the time.  I had 3 episodes of it after getting home, and now I'm getting bound up and I'm not even allowed to be on the Immodium until I heal.  I'm trying to drink a lot, but I've been put on Lasix for excessive fluid build-up in my feet, so that's probably affecting how my intestines are working. 

Now, I'm getting bloodwork because of being on Lasix and bloodwork for being on Lovenox on different scheduled days, plus I'm scheduled for bloodwork for my oncologist at the hospital where I got my chemo before (the hospital where I'd worked) so he can get working on preparing me for chemo.  It looks like I'm going to have Carboplatin and Taxol again because they are considered to have worked the last time, plus I may need radiation, too, which I didn't have before.  I was stage IVb when I had my first surgery in May, 2010.

I'm just so glad to be home, although I can't sleep in my own bed because it's too tall for me to get in and out of now with my sore belly and leg.  The hospital was just horribly noisy at night.  The nurses or techs were in the room at least every 2 hours.  I'm a very light sleeper, so they always disturbed me.  I had a roommate with probable Alzheimer's one night who was at the hospital trying to find her mother, who had died earlier in March, and was going to call her father, who had died 16 years before, to come and take her home.  The hospital had her strapped into bed and she didn't like being held prisoner for her "one" day of confusion.  She'd been to the hospital two times in the last two weeks looking for her dead mother.  Another roommate had a history of ovarian cancer, and when they'd found a cyst on her colon, they'd thought it was back.  In repairing it, they had unknowingly perforated her bowel.  When she'd returned for a repair, they'd done it again.  She'd finally ended up in the ICU with a bad infection.  She had drains coming out of her which stunk pretty badly at times.  I don't know which of us was worse, me with my diarrhea or her with her drains.  She was a very nice person, though, and I was glad to have met her.

Thank you all for your replies to my previous posting from before surgery.