The End of a Chapter?

Once again, it’s been a few months since my last post. And once again, that’s mostly been good news. Becky hadn’t had any major issues for several months. She had some routine tests, and some not-so-routine tests, and everything came back normal. The main issue recently had been that her recovery from the shoulder surgery was quite a bit more difficult than we expected. It set her back a bit in terms of general strength and stamina, but she was getting back to the point of doing some evening walks to try to prepare for our upcoming Disney vacation. And then...

Well, before I go there, a step back. For those that have been following along at home, you may remember that Becky had been back to the ER and/or hospital for nausea, stomach, and abdominal issues several times over the past year and half. Prior to last week, she had been diagnosed with four separate small bowel obstructions (SBOs). Now, back to last week...

Becky started feeling the now familiar symptoms of an SBO once again last Tuesday. After a couple exchanges with her team at UTSW to figure out what next steps might be, she started feeling worse and the decision became easier. We were headed back to the local ER.

Once we went through all the normal steps - blood work, CT scans, etc. - there was one aspect of this episode that was slightly different. The radiologist reported that although not conclusive, there were indications that this SBO could be a “closed loop” obstruction. That raised the bar in terms of urgency because that can quickly lead to intestinal damage and related complications.

As a reminder (because I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before), one of the primary causes of SBOs is scar tissue. However, we learned two new things on that front during this visit. First, it’s not likely that the transplant surgery was the primary or even a significant contributor to the scar tissue around the intestine. Her new transplant organs are not really in that area. Second, the most common cause of scar tissue in women that deal with SBOs are hysterectomy and gall bladder surgeries. Becky has had both plus a few other surgeries in her abdominal area over the years.

What did all this mean? Well, after talking through the options with the ER surgeon for almost half an hour (which I was extremely appreciative of), we decided that it was time to take the next step. Rather than continuing the typical non-invasive methods to address the SBO, we decided to go with the option of performing surgery to see if we could address the scar tissue as the root cause. Becky went into surgery somewhere around midnight, and I hung out in the very empty OR waiting room shown in the photo above.

There is a lot more to this story and decision, but I’ll go with the a short version here. The surgeon started by attempting laparoscopy, but there was so much scar tissue he could not make any progress. He ended up making a rather long incision, and spending a fair amount of time, separating scar tissue from her intestines as well addressing scar tissue around her colon and in her pelvis. Fortunately, there was not a closed loop SBO, so it was not necessary to repair or remove a section of her intestine.

The good news is that this should provide some longer term relief from the SBO problems. The bad news (there always seems to be a little bad news with the good news) is that since this was a more invasive surgery that ultimately required the surgeon to “put everything back” when he was done (his words), Becky was pretty sore afterward. It also took her system a little longer to start working again after the surgery, but we made it. After several days in the hospital, Becky is back home and back on the road to recovery so she can get back to babysitting grandkids (but without carrying them for the next six weeks).

Once again, we are thankful to those that stood beside us in prayer.

Here’s hoping this is the end of this chapter (at least for now) and that we don’t need to make any more ER trips in the near future! I don’t really need a reason to monitor the construction progress at the hospital!