I put that title there because I wish I could have one. But alas, nothing is going down properly except rice and mushy things, like… rice.
Lots of things came out of my last colonoscopy. I got switched to Cimzia from Humira. I was taken off Pentasa, and I got two referrals. The first was to a surgeon at Penn State Hershey, and the other was to a Crohn’s specialist at the University of Pennsylvania. I think this is a slick way of saying… the Gimpy Colon baffles all….
I was happy about the surgeon referral which is a 180 from the attitude I had when I first diagnosed. Crohn’s disease doesn’t just affect the digestive system. It causes pain. Lots of pain. It different for different people. All CD sufferers are different. Mine is in the lower right side right around the appendix and it kind of curls around to my back. My GI doctor described it best when he said it feels like a toothache. Kind of a raw pain that’s not so debilitating that you need immediate medical attention, but bad enough to keep me from sleeping or walking, or wanting to leave the house. So I take a lot of pain killers. My favorite is Ultram, but I hear my liver is going to explode from taking too much of it. Vicodin is my second favorite, but I can’t drive with Vicodin. That said, I’ve had enough with all of this and am willing to give surgery a go if that’s what everyone thinks I should do. If it ceases my dependence on pain killers, even better.
Farmboy and I went up to visit the surgeon in Hershey the other day. He was a nice enough guy… for a surgeon. He said that since my terminal ileum is such a mess and it’s really just that area where most of my troubles are, that doing a ileocolectomy will be my best option. We went over everything the surgery entails. Recovery time, things like that. The surgery is scheduled for a date in November so that I can still go to see the specialist in Philadelphia. I’m pretty sure I’m still doing the surgery, but since the surgeon I’m using and the Philly specialist know each other, I can get a quick second opinion and also discuss with Philly guy what the best course of action will be after the surgery is over.
The surgery is scheduled the week before Thanksgiving week which doesn’t bother me at all. What does bother me is that the boy has a big soccer tournament that Saturday, so I have approximately five days to recover enough to hobble onto a soccer field and sit myself down on one of those fold-a-chairs. Of course, there’s a shot that I won’t even be released before that time, which means all of that fretting about making the soccer tournament is moot. So it goes.
In a few weeks, my BFF, Butter (not her real name) and I will be taking a road trip (the first one we’ve taken in zillions of years) over to the city of brotherly love to meet with yet another member of my lucky, lucky medical team. Because Butter and I rarely do anything that doesn’t end up in some kind of usually bizarre story, often but not always, involving potatoes… I’m sure I will have a tale to tell.
Stay tuned!
The Gimpy Colon* 