Monday 17 February 2014

The Dilemma I am Currently Facing. Advice from surgeons needed.

I don't know what to do about these future operations. They come in two stages with a final third adapting stage.

  1. Create the pouch in the area where the rectum was but create another ileostomy in the same place as the current one and use that ileostomy until the pouch is fully healed.
  2. After (as doctors say) 3 to six months, bring the ileostomy back in, configure the small intestine back inside me properly and get the pouch up and running. 
  3. Learning to use the pouch can take months. It is basically the same as having the bag i have outside my tummy at the moment, only its inside me. It fills up, then i go to the toilet, sit down and empty it. Only with the pouch, i obviously won't be able to see it, so accidents can and probably WILL happen. It is a difficult thing to manage but in time it becomes 'easy'.
So, in total, these stages accumulate to around 10-12 months. Because of this, the original plan was to finish IB next year after repeating upper sixth (so graduate may 2015), then start the ops and finish and go to uni in october 2016. However, do i really want to push uni back ANOTHER year? Releasing i would 1 year behind was one thing, but 2 is very difficult.

So i have had a new idea. I dont know if it'll work/if my surgeons will approve it, but here it is.
  • Finish IB in may 2015. 
  • Have the first operation as soon as i finish, so late may/early june. 
  • Recover from that surgery in 2-4 months; similar to how I've recovered from my recent operation.
  • Go to university there and then (October 2015) and postpone the next operation until i finish my first year of uni, so may 2016. 
  • The second op is very small-it is the adapting process that takes time. But if i have it in may/june, i will have 3 months or so to learn over the summer of 2015 and then return to my second year of uni HOPEFULLY with a relatively normal life.
To me, this all sounds good. I just don't know if im allowed to increase the gap between the two ops from 3-6 months to nearly a year. I need to find out asap.

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