You Can Have My Bowel Obstruction

[Guest guest]

> Rick,

.....I hate to say this, but I'm kinda envious of you people that have

had BO's and had to have more intestine bypassed....

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For all of you folks who are envious let me say that it IS nice to

have the slack that the additional lost intestine gives you. I can

more of everything now. HOWEVER, I would rather have to struggle with

strict carb regulation for the rest of my life than to have one hour

of the pain I went through with that bowel obstruction. It was so

bad that I thought I had gone insane and the pain was part of a

psychotic episode because pain like could not be real. No organism

was ever designed to tolerate that level of pain. They could only

knock me out because I couldn't take it awake. I have a high

threshold of pain so I am not a wimp. I was back to work in three

weeks after my original distal open RNY. But this was beyond belief.

It has been more than a year since then and I am still

psychologically affected by the memory of that pain and I probably

will be for a long time. None of that even addresses the level of

anguish that my family went through seeing me endure that pain and be

so close to death so suddenly. It was particularly psychologically

damaging because everything had gone so well up to then; I really was

the " poster child " for the procedure. Then my mortality came and

smacked me between the eyes with a nail-studded two by four. In the

back of my mind there is always the worry about nutritional deficit

issues that might occur as I get older.

Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.

Rick S.