July 10, 2016 - Apriljwagner

This is Neil again. The last time I wrote I left off at April and I waiting for her to get an MRI. Well a lot has happened since then, but I am not going to write about all of that because I only have one thing on my mind. Currently I am writing this in our room at the hospital all alone while April is upstairs having another operation. (scoliosis)

So April has been complaining about abdominal pains for a couple days and she hasn’t been allowed to eat or drink really. Her stomach has been very distended And painful to the touch. Once the MRI was read the Fellow rounded on April and told her the MRI looked great in regards to her spine, but they were concerned about her bowels. He said they were ordering a stat X-ray of her abdomen. The results came back and it looked like she has a large ileus in her bowels, so the doctor wrote orders for her to go to CT stat to get scanned. The CT scan showed she had some very distended bowels, especially her cecum. A colorectal specialist doctor came to see April and told us she has a cecal bascule. A cecal bascule is where the cecum (the beginning of the large intestine) somehow becomes folded over on itself and causes a bowel obstruction. Normally the cecum is about 4cm and April has become distended to 9cm and the only way to fix it is surgery.

Mobile X-ray brought to our room

CT scan

The surgery is called a right hemicolectomy. They are going to make an incision down the middle of her stomach. Eventually dissect down to where the cecum is, pull it up out of her body, along with her other bowels and first inspect all the other bowels for anything wrong, this is called running the bowel. Hopefully nothing else will be wrong and only about 1 foot of her large intestine with be cut out. She will still have about 5 feet left, so best case scenario she won’t have digestive issues, but it is a possibility. They will use a stapler to staple across both sides of the bad bowel, leaving two ends of good bowel that the doctors, in very simple terms, will then sew back together.

So that’s it. I am currently sitting here writing this, but I extremely scared. She has already been through so much. She had an 11 hour, two part major scoliosis surgery with massive blood loss and spinal cord damage. Now this. I really don’t know what to do right now. I am just scared.

CT scan – you can see how distended the bowel is.

Scared (Scoliosis)

apriljwagner