Hi Everyone,
I had my laparoscopic surgery for a low anterior resection of upper rectal cancer a week ago and was discharged from hospital Tuesday night.
I just wanted to share my experience in case it answers anybody else’s questions or concerns. I’ll start by saying that I have suffered from severe depression and anxiety for around 11 years and wanted to know every possible permutation of each scenario. Because of the kindness, compassion and skill of each person involved I was actually relatively in control of my anxiety on the day of the surgery.
I was particularly nervous about having an epidural, having seen the size of the needle when our daughter was born. I can say I honestly needn’t have worried about this at all, I didn’t feel the initial local anaesthetic jab to numb the site and had to actually ask if they had finished with the epidural itself because it was completely painless.
I then remember briefly seeing my surgeon in theatre as they wheeled me through and the next thing I was waking up in recover around 8 hours later (I was on a slow wake up as my operation ran longer than expected I believe).
The surgery was a success and the surgeon is very happy he got all the cancer and was able to reattach everything so there was no need for a stoma bag.
I went to a ward and was initially receiving level 1 care and had a nurse from ITU with me the first night.
The main problem I experienced was initially my bowels decided to do what they wanted when they wanted without keeping me in the loop. I felt a bit robbed of my dignity but what I would say is the nurses and particularly the health care assistants were fantastic and so compassionate.
I did experience a little scare along the way to my recovery. I started to pass black blood the following afternoon and night which indicated I had a bleed higher in my body. I had experienced violent and persistent hiccups earlier in the day and they believe I may have slightly torn something. I had also become anaemic. They wanted to send me for a endoscopy but couldn’t do it as I was in too much pain at the time. The pain was only because they had not managed my pain relief properly. I’m not saying this to scare anyone and obviously this won’t happen to everyone. I had incredible care from every since HCA and the vast majority of nurses, unfortunately I just copped for a couple of nurses who were seemingly not bothered and you could see that the HCA’s were not happy with them. If you do experience anything like this raise your concerns to someone, that is what I did and it changed everything for me. Whilst down with the endoscopy team I told them of my experience and also phoned my lead nurse. Thankfully for me my bowel movements changed, the blood loss stopped and the anaemia reversed. It looks like the bleed had healed itself so I didn’t need to have the endoscopy. When I was taken back to the ward two endoscopy nurses came with me and spoke to the nurses on my ward. From that point on my pain was managed impeccably with medication on time and I have to say the same happened for the rest of the patients on the ward too.
The following day I was discharged and now home I’m just learning what my bowels are doing. They are very unpredictable still but I’ve been told to expect that for a least a few weeks.
if there’s any advice I would give it is to take each little bit of the journey one step at a time, if not you can try and second guess what may happen. Secondly if you have any questions ask, I found it really important to check what they were doing and why and to query things as sometimes what I was told on ward contradicted what my surgeon had said so don’t be afraid to ask.
Not everyone will have a similar experience to me but I’ll be forever grateful to all the amazing people that cared for me and will be contacting the hospital about the not so good bits so they can hopefully make sure it doesn’t happen again.
I have always classed myself as a bit of a wuss so if I can make it this far so can anyone. I’m now waiting for an appointment in January to hear the results and see if I need any post op chemotherapy.
Good luck to anyone reading this, at whatever stage of your journey you are at.
Craig
