Waiting for surgery....my story

Thanks for letting me know about the HIDA scan . It sounds like a nightmare.  Well , it's good that you don't have kidney stones. Although they are not always easy to detect.  Sometimes you (one) can have pain because you're passing a stone or have just passed one. So when they do a scan , they'll say that you don't suffer from kidney stones as there aren't any stuck in your tube,  To make 100% sure it's a good idea to take a scan of the kidneys as the stones form there.  And they stick to a kidney until they drop down into the urine tube. 

So they hospitalise you for Colitis and then s another doc says you don't have it!  Incredible !  I thought the doctors in the U.S were very competent due to the advancement of medical care there and the law suits !  It's terrible what they've put you through.   In the UK  we do have a good health care system . But it is crumbling due to our ruthless government .We do expect incompetence though! 

Since my last post I did see a new gastroenterologist, he questioned my surgery for the gallbladder and the resection. His thinking is that it could be an extreme case of IBS, although he didn’t convince me. This of course made me even more confused than I was before. So I followed his new instructions, I stopped taking the Apriso medication, started taking Bentyl 4 times a day, Celexa once a day, and start a low FODMAP diet.  He also ordered another HIDA scan. This was on Tuesday, by Thursday the Celexa was making me so nauseous I couldn’t take it any longer. I was nauseous to begin with, and the medication magnified it 100 times. By Friday the Bentyl had made me so constipated that my pain had increased exponentially.  The diet didn’t help either. 

The week with these changes made things much worse.

I met with my primary care doctor to try to make sense of all this. He canceled the HIDA scan stating that even if it came back negative he would recommend getting my gallbladder out anyway based on my pain, symptoms, and images. I agreed with him on the gallbladder. We then discussed my history over the past 20 years dealing with this condition. Because i’m Not getting any better after 4 months, it’s time for the resection. 

I then proceeded to show him the research I did to diagnosis myself. I think I have something called SUDD. This stands for Symptomatic Uncomplicated Diverticula Disease. All the doctors, gastroenterologists, and surgeons I have seen have been pointing all around this condition! Some have said Colitis, IBS, hypersensitive colic, etc. The following is an excerpt from an article on SUDD. 

Symptomatic uncomplicated diverticular disease

In the recent years, there has been an evolution in the taxo- nomic classification of symptomatic diverticular disease into several distinct types.These include chronic recurrent diverticulitis, segmental colitis associated with diverticulosis and symptomatic uncomplicated diverticular disease (SUDD).6,7 SUDD is defined as chronic diverticulosis with associated chronic abdominal pain in the absence of acute symptoms of diverticulitis or overt colitis.7 There may be an overlap between SUDD and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) due to similar patho- physiologic mechanisms underlying both disease processes, which includes visceral hypersensitivity.7 This was studied by Clemens et al.,8 where they found that SUDD patient had hyper- algesia in the sigmoid colon with diverticula. SUDD is further compared to IBS in regards to altered colonic motility. Bassotti et al.9 demonstrated that patients with diverticulosis have a re- duction in the number of colonic interstitial cells of Cajal (ICC) and enteric glial cells even though there was no abnormalities in the enteric neuronal population. They studied ICC due to their role in regulation of intestinal motor function and postulated that with reduction in ICC, there is a decrease in colonic electri- cal slow wave activity which results in slowed transit. At this time, it is unclear whether SUDD and IBS are on a continuum in terms of their pathophysiology or whether patients with IBS are more likely to have diverticulosis and therefore with chronic abdominal pain be labeled as SUDD.

I’m now 2 weeks post op, and doing well. So, they took about a foot of intestine, total sigmoid and part of descending, the surgeon said it was pretty bad, twisted and adhered to abdominal wall, gallbladder was twisted too. My lower right side pain was from adhesions from my old appendectomy. In total I have 8 holes in me. The worst part has been trying to get the gas out that they use during surgery. I was in the hospital for a total of 5 days and have been recovering slowly since. Better days are ahead!