One Week Until Surgery

I started this blog to document my inevitable journey towards surgery. Then I got uncomfortable with sharing so many intimate details about how I was feeling. Mostly because I am terrified of what's about to happen.

And it is literally just about to happen. I am one week away from a total colectomy and having an ileostomy bag for a few months while I recover.

For those of you who are familiar with this surgery, I am have the two step process. For those of you who are not familiar here is my explanation of it.

Monday, December 2, my surgeon will go on into my abdomen laproscopically (meaning with a camera, he won't have to cut me wide open) remove my entire colon, and maybe part of my ileum, which is the part that starts to turn from large intestine to the small intestine. So he will take all that out (through my belly button, eeek!), and then create the "j-pouch." The j-pouch will be my new reserve area, and it is shaped like a "j," hence the name. But it won't be hooked up yet. He'll also create a stoma, which is a hole in the skin that a bit of the small intestine will poke through, and deposit waste into an ostomy bag. This is meant to be a temporary bag to give time for everything to heal and situated.

This healing is important because he said the less problems I have with the j-pouch (no infections) the better my pouch will function once it's all hooked back up.

I'm learning new tidbits every day on this app I discovered a little over a year ago. It's called GI Monitor and there are a bunch of people on it with IBD. It's an amazingly supportive app. So any worry or question that pops into my head, I ask on there and have a response for 5+ people within minutes. And these are answers from doctors who read about this experience in some medical textbook. These are people who have been through it all! Oh yeah and you can track your symptoms on it too. Hahaha! That's what it was created for, but I stick around for the socialize feature.

So the latest thing I learned today was that the air that pump into your abdomen get trapped in your shoulders and makes them really sore! What! Now I not only have to worry about incision pain, stoma pain, j-pouch un-comfortableness, but now this wacky shoulder pain? From air!

Apparently it can be massaged out, but this blew my mind.

Maybe I'm more prepared for this surgery than I thought I was, since this little tidbit is so shocking? Hahaha forget the poop coming out my side, but my shoulders will be sore!?!

Six days and counting......