Body piercing comes FREE with colon surgery!!

continued from Part I...

When I woke up from my operation I had another surprise.  Stitches are no longer in vogue.  The latest thing is staples and I had a dozen or so of them in my belly.  At right is an actual photo of my stylin' body piercing.  My tummy is obviously not at its most attractive right now but give it a break... it's been through a lot.  Once I've worked it over for a couple months I'll publish the "after"  shot with the cool scar, the muscles all rehabbed and the skin all tanned. 

According to the surgeons, stapling is better because it bunches up the skin so there is no tension on the parts that are growing back together.  I assume they sewed the underlying muscles back together with dissolving stitches.  Well it feels quite prickly and every time you move you feel like you are going to rupture something.   They cautioned me to be careful when moving about and move slowly and that is sooooo not my style. 

Interestingly enough my evil polyp was not where the endoscopy doctor said it was. He said right at the "splenic flexture" (sounds so official doesn't it?) which is where the colon bends and goes horizontal over to the liver side. It was actually quite a bit further in. I'm guessing it's because they failed to adjust the measurements for the fact that I am a smaller than average individual. In order to locate the tumor in the real world (using the tattoo as a marker) the surgery team had already punched three laproscopy holes in the left side. You can see them quite clearly in the photo above. If they had known where it really was, I suspect they would have punched the holes on the other side for a better angle.  I suspect also that is the reason I ended up with a vertical rather than the promised horizontal incision.  Think about it... if the tool is inserted from the left and crosses the midline, the easiest egress will be through a vertical incision.  The comic strip is my concept the moment they made this discovery in the OR. Perhaps it is a deep memory from anasthesia or perhaps I just made it up. Who cares? It had to have been something like that!

One way or another the procedure was finished and I found myself awake, pumped full of morphine and trapped in a hospital bed with a catheter and a tummy that hurt even to breathe.  After a while the doctors had listened to my tummy and determined that it was no longer paralyzed from the surgery, so they allowed me to have "clear liquids". This means essentially salty water or sugar water in the form of "broth", Jell-O, sugary "juice", or popsicles, all of them entirely nutritionally bankrupt. I had my husband bring in some canned vegetable broth instead. I quickly advanced to "full liquids" where you have a much larger selection, but they all turn out to be various forms of white-flour based flavored wallpaper paste. I've been told that the regular hospital menu has improved a lot in recent years, but the restricted diet patients  still get nutritionally shorted, just like 20 years ago when I worked in a hospital kitchen. Get me out of here so I can get some REAL nutrition and some SLEEP! I was thinking.

The medical establishment minimizes nutrition as therapy because they have important things to worry about, such as drugs. Oh just get some calories in 'em, is how they think. That thinking is borne of ignorance and indifference and I predict it will change radically in the next couple decades. It is pretty well accepted among alternative practitioners and healers who are not all tangled up with the big pharmaceutical-medical establishment  that consumption of excessive sugar and refined white flour actually promotes the growth of cancer, so it seems a little odd to be stuffing exclusively salt, sugar and white flour down someone who just had surgery for potential CANCER!! There are TONS of healthy nutritious and delicious soups, smoothies, and soft foods you can eat after colon surgery, none of which involve sugar or white flour. The hospital of the future will have its own organic farm.  That is the only way to guarantee  feeding   patients truly the best!

Through sheer will power I got released from that hospital less than 48 hours after they closed my tummy. I educated my husband a little bit on how to feed me and he came through beautifully. I went off my pain med the next day and I saved the Vicodin for truly excrutiating pain such as back pain. Now I could rest, relax, and clear the toxic residues of anasthesia, pain meds, proton pump inhibitors and all the rest of the junk that they pumped into my veins. Milk thistle tincture is an excellent supplement to help your liver deal with toxins.  I also had Chinese trauma pills, Vitamin E for the incision, and the firm intention to get this incision out into the sun if the fickle Oregon spring weather would cooperate.  

I close this hub with this piece of truly bad poetry.  One of my friends remarked that the fourth stanza is so bad it's good.  I had to get the Tri-Lyte in there somehow.  It was one of the highlights of the whole ordeal.  Anyway, no Poetry Pulitzers for me but I hope it makes you chuckle: 

There once was a girl named Colleen

who expected her scope to be clean.

When they looked up her butt

they said, "Honey guess what!

There's a huge polyp there that looks mean.



There's only one thing we can do:

hack a section of gut out of you.

But we'll stitch you up fine

with high quality twine

And you will be almost like new.



Now Colleen, please do not be blue.

We gave you a colon tattoo.

When they open your gut

They'll see just where to cut

And things will go better for you.



Now here is a gallon of Tri-lyte

Drink a cup each 10 minutes and go shite.

Keep on goin' to the john

till the Tri-Lyte is gone

or your poo runs as clear as the daylight."



They persuaded Colleen to recline

And they probed and they slit her midline

After moments of doubt

The bad polyp came out

And the best news of all was:  BENIGN.