It's been a good week since my last post, and things are moving along, even if a bit slowly. I haven't been walking as much, but I went on a 5 mile bike ride today and have been doing some pull-ups as well. I'm still feeling good and ready to get on with the next surgery. But before that, a side note about some pain.

Last weekend I was going to get in my car to go visit a friend and my stomach area started hurting. It was right on the scar maybe an inch below my belt line, it just started getting tender. Didn't hurt if I sat up straight and didn't poke at it, so I went about my business. The next day it was more tender, and if I stood up straight, there was a bit of a bump forming on the scar. It wasn't red or anything, and I wasn't having a fever so I was pretty sure it wasn't an infection. Actually my thought was that maybe it was a small abcess forming in the scar tissue or something. Wasn't bad enough yet to seek medical help, but definitely worth keeping an eye on.

The following day I had an appointment with my ET nurse, and my sore spot was already feeling a lot better. I had the nurse take a look and she advised me to have my surgeon examine it when I saw him on Thursday, but she said it could be one of the internal stitches had dissolved enough to come loose and the rest was just in a spot dissolving and being an irritant. She said they are supposed to dissolve in 6 - 8 weeks, and this was at the 6.5 week mark, so seemed like a high probability. Anyway, the soreness got better every day until by the time I saw my surgeon it was feeling fine.

Speaking of seeing my surgeon, that was the appointment I had been waiting for. I've been anxious to schedule my next surgery where they'll reconnect my intestines and I can start using my j-pouch. That surgery is referred to as the Take Down surgery by the way. So I've been anxious to get that phase underway. Well, the first thing my doc need to do is "dilate my butt"... there is just nothing fun about that. Ouch! So this will be way too much information for some of you, but the reason for doing this is that because of the surgery and lack of use of the rectum, your rectum will shrink to the point that not much will fit through the opening. They need to basically stretch it out and break up the scar tissue and let the muscles contract to keep the opening closed. Yeah, Ouch! It's a short term pain, and definitely not as bad as the deep down internal pains that come with the drains they put in you after having some major surgeries.

So after that bit of fun, we talked about scheduling my next surgery. I need to have my "pouch scoped" first to make sure it's all looking good, and then I need to have a leak test done to make sure it healed up without any leaks. At first they said they probably couldn't even do those tests until March because of scheduling issues, but they had a cancellation and will be able to do it this next Friday. That's good news. If that goes well, I think I'll be able to have my Take Down surgery within a couple weeks.

The Take Down surgery will hopefully be better... it's supposed to be. I've been told I'll be in the hospital for 4-5 days if everything goes ok and then I'll need at least 2 weeks to recover, depending on how fast I heal and all that. The doc said he would try to go in through the stoma hole to reattach everything if he can, otherwise he'll have to open up my earlier incision again and the recovery can take longer in that case. Anytime you're cutting through the abdominal wall, recovery takes some time.

Other than that, not much new. On Friday I swung by my work to say hi to everybody. Actually I was going to participate in an interview we had scheduled but our candidate took another offer. So I hung out for a couple hours and participated in a quick meeting instead. It was cool seeing everybody again and letting them know how I'm doing. It'll be good to get back to work.

-jk