Patching up the dragon

As you probably read in the last entry things took a turn for the serious and with the liver issue my guts surgeon Mr C can't take the primary bowel cancer out as it would cause too many problems with the liver, so the liver mets need bringing under control first. This however causes a bit of a problem as the primary cancer will most likely continue to grow and could end up blocking the colon.

Apparently this is "bad" and would involve flashing blue lights, emergency surgery, intensive care units and nurses and doctors looking at each other meaningfully over my bed just like in Holby City. So to avoid that scenario the doctors are going to put something called a "stent" in. Here's what they look like:

Fig 2: Medical chicken wire

As you can see its basically a medical-grade chicken wire tube. Now they don't need to operate to put these in so on tuesday I get a call from the hospital to come on up to the endoscopy department the following day and they fit my new tube and have another crack at the biopsy at the same time. "And you don't need to take the picolax and fast for two days first," they say

Hooray!

"You will need an enema though, two actually"

Boo!

So two weeks after the original diagnosis I'm back in Endoscopy and a very nice nurse is shoving a tube up my bum. "It should take between two and five minutes to work," she says "and the lavatories are just outside on the left and ri..."

"IT WON'T TAKE TWO MINUTES!"

So on Monday the bottom fell out of my world. And on Wednesday the world fell out of my bottom. Twice

Anyway after that I had a quick chat with Dr D who had done the original colonoscopy who gave me the run down on the procedure and asked me to sign the "consent to poke dragons with sticks" form and in I go, they pump me full of pethidine and some sort of sedative and this time I fall right asleep - I have vague memories of waking up and trying to get up only to be told "Here have some gas and air", biting down on some plastic mouthpiece and some pain but it was all a bit woozy to be honest and afterwards Dr D said it had all gone well so I guess I hadn't trashed theatre after all (always a potential hazard when operating on fire breathing irritable reptiles that).

They kept me in for the rest of the day for observations, especially as I was now "the man who had the Entonox" and there was talk of an overnight admission but good progress (and probably a lack of beds) meant I could go home in the early evening.

So here I am four days later. It's not all been plain sailing as I keep getting cramps in my guts and it would be unwise to stray more than a few metres from the bog but it is starting to settle down so with any luck that's that bit sorted.    

They'd better have got this bloody biopsy right this time!