Nothing But Love :: golf blogger

GORTEX AND GUTS

Stacey asked me to post something. She dictated this, but I added some stuff so it is more coherent. -- B.

here's the story. i had abdominal surgery about 5 years ago; then gall bladder surgery about a year after. bill thought i had an incisional hernia after the gall bladder surgery. went to the doctor. told me it was my fault since i didn't do enough sit-ups or leg lifts ... whatever. so, bill convinced me to call and talk to the surgeon's partner a couple months ago because the hernia was much larger and causing some pain. the guy said he would open me up and put mesh over the site and sew me back up and then there would be a better than 50 percent chance of failure. he said i could die on the table. he obviously didn't want to be bothered with me.

i went to another doctor, this time at the cleveland clinic, who said he would repair it laparoscopically. mesh, he said, was nasty stuff; gortex is better, he said, because it won't stick ... thick gortex ... he also said it wasn't one hernia but at least four ...

anyway, surgery was yesterday. 4 1/2 hours of surgery. time flies when you're unconscious on a ventilator and someone poking around in your abdominal cavity, blowing up your abdomen with carbon dioxide, pulling your guts back in through the SEVEN gaping holes ... swiss cheese, Steve the Surgeon said. i love the guy. honest, unpretentious, called me at home before the surgery to let me know some things ... didn't say he was DOC-TOR blah-blah-blah, but Steve blah-blah-blah.

anyway, from what he told bill because i was totally out of it, the swiss-cheesed area was 22 cm by 13 cm, which is 8 1/2 inches by 5 inches, which he covered, after doing what he had to do to get my intestines back into my abdomen, with a 30 cm by 20 cm patch of thick gortex, which he then stapled all the way around on the inside and then stitched twice around all the way through the gortex, the abdominal wall, and out the abdomen ...

fentanyl, which is 50 to 100 times more potent as a pain killer than morphine, is not doing a heck of a lot for the pain. i apologized to the nursing staff this morning for being a bad patient ... not at my best. not my usual nice and delightful.

that's the story. be home when i feel like it.

*dbnr*