Fistulas & surgery, a little graphic

Once again I've ended up with an uncommon side effect that few people seem to get. How did I get so lucky? 

So, for the past year, since the sepsis, I've never really felt right. Nausea to varying degrees every single day. Weak, no stamina, just feeling miserable. I was beating myself up mentally for it. Thinking maybe I'd become lazy or something. Now I have an explanation for it all.

In February I went back on chemo. Two weeks later my entire crotch area was scalded from some sort of something coming out vaginally. I couldn't figure out what it was but it seemed a lot like what goes in my bag. I had to stop chemo because it was so bad. It eventually eased up but I still had this odd discharge and had to wear incontinance pads every day because of the amount and the inability to stop it.

A few weeks ago it started up again and all hell broke loose. I could barely leave my bed because it was a constant flow. I'd sit on the toilet for long periods of time trying to dry the area and get rid of whatever it was. As soon as I'd stand up it would come out again. And it burned. Like someone had poured acid on my crotch. It hurt to sit as well.

It got so bad I was sick as a dog and it was a contsant flow. I went to the hospital. They sent me to the hospital in the city and they did a ct scan. Every ct I've had for the past few years has been difficult to read due to the amount of internal adhesions I have. They decided I had a fistula that was allowing fecal material to get into my vagina. Lovely. I was scheduled for surgery asap. It would initially be exploratory and then they would fix what they found, if they could. Apparently fistulas are not always repairable.

The surgeon spoke with my daughter and I, she'd happened to be there when they whisked me off at 7 pm. He said he'd do his best but would just go in and try to fix it and get out. It would take an hour and a half to two hours. He was very kind and left both of us feeling like he'd be the one to fix me. It was reassuring in a time of terrible fear.

It turned out he worked on me for 6 hours. He took out as much of the adhesions as possible and made sure to remove the ones that had been choking off my kidneys so now my kidney values have improved greatly. He took out my bowels and checked them throughly for anything he thought might be an issue in future and ended up taking a section out. He looked for cancer because the cts had shown that I possibly had a new mass, there was none. And he fixed a total of three fistulas.

It turned out that a section of bowel had dropped down and grown into something below it and it had eaten away at and created fistulas in my upper vagina and colon. Uncommon but does happen.

I felt better from the minute I woke up. It's been a long couple of weeks since the surgery but I'm improving every day. I am now free from nausea and feeling stronger already. My two surgeons- the one who worked on me two weeks ago and my cancer surgeon- said I should feel a lot better than before once I'm healed and it should give me a new lease on life.

The other good news is that they don't think the cancer has gone to my liver as prviously postulated. And I wasn't full of cancer when they opened me up, which was another possibility. My husband and I had to have 'the talk' before surgery because they weren't sure I'd even survive it. It was a terrifying time.

So now I'm home and getting better every day. I am so thankful for my surgeon for going above and beyond to try to improve my life. They worked on me until 2 am when they could have been done by 10. He came to see me a couple of days after the surgery and just stood in the middle of my room grinning at me. Then came over and took my hands in his and we talked and I thanked him over and over. He said he was just doing his job. He's fabulous, I was so lucky.

Jan