Jan. 2: Not a cool start to 2009

And you thought the bit in our Christmas letter about the hernia repair surgery was a joke…

Sit down. This one’s gonna take a while.

It’s possible you’ve heard me complain about sharp pain in my abdomen at times. I’ve had it off and on since Jack was born and always attributed it to the C-section.

There have been times when the pain has been worse, so I told my doctor about it several years ago. She said she thought I had a fistula and sent me back to the OB/GYN that did my C-sections.

My OB said there was no way I had a fistula and said it was probably a lump of excessive scar tissue from the C-section. She said she could remove some but that it was an awfully big surgical procedure for something that didn’t bother me much. I let the issue drop; it wasn’t like the pain was constant. I learned to live with it.

Since that time, and especially in the past six months or so, this lump in my belly has gone from hurting occasionally to hurting all the live-long day. In fact, it frequently takes my breath away when I stand quickly. Coughing makes me want to die. It wakes me up at night when I roll over. It hurts if I touch it. Don’t test me on this; I will not let you touch it. If you try, I will slap you and then kick you (the slap is for the inappropriate touching; the kick is because I told you: IT HURTS. The pain is not in my nether regions so much as it’s near my nether regions, but it’s still in the no-touchy zone. OKAY?).

Anyhoo…

I saw my regular doctor last month and mentioned that this pain has become nearly unbearable. We went through lots of possibilities: endometriosis, ovarian cysts, ectopic pregnancy, menopause (I hit her for that suggestion), and all sorts of other miserable sounding ailments. The symptoms fit none of those things. She decided it was a hernia, and it made sense because the lump is easier to feel when I’m standing than lying on my back, and the conditions under which it’s most painful fit the profile of a hernia. She referred me to a surgeon.

The surgeon said that although it could be a hernia, it probably wasn’t an incisional hernia because of its location (not close to the C-section incision). He ordered a CT scan so we could get a better idea. I appreciated him doing this rather than just randomly cutting into my tummy.

I went in for the CT on Monday this week. The tech was very nice but it was odd that he insisted on watching me undress. Note: CT tech husbands apparently take many liberties when their wives come in for scans. S’okay though; I put on a show for the whole department and afterward they gave me one of those stickers that says “I did a slow, seductive strip tease for my husband’s coworkers today!”

The surgeon reviewed the CT with me on Wednesday. (The pictures were really cool. The only other CT I’ve had was to look at my sinuses and it was super boring. Also, that same tech made me take off my pants that time. So weird.) The scan showed a mass of some kind on my abdominal wall. Neither the radiologist nor the surgeon knows exactly what it is, but say it definitely isn’t a hernia. They also assured me that it does NOT appear to be cancerous. They think it could be a hematoma or excessive scar tissue. Once removed, they’ll send it to a pathologist to find out exactly what it is. I bet that means I don’t get to take it home in a jar, huh? Sooo not fair. It’s mine, isn’t it?

Alright, so I want to get this over with as soon as possible, and even though they consider this “elective” and there’s no urgency, I managed to schedule the surgery for next Thursday. If all things go as they should, I’ll be discharged by evening. I won’t have general anesthesia but will probably be given enough of whatever in my IV to make me really sleepy and not too aware of what’s happening. I prefer not to be awake at all, but recovering from general anesthesia would suck.

The thing that made my heart beat a little faster—and not in a good way—is that the surgery is called “excision of abdominal wall tumor.” The surgeon never used the word “tumor” when we were talking about the possibilities of what this weird growth is, so it kinda freaked me out. Yes, I know many tumors are benign and nothing to be concerned about, but it was just a bit of a shock to see that word on the surgical order.

Kath, I know what you’re thinking: “It’s not a toomah!” But apparently it IS a toomah.

So that’s that. I didn’t want to blog about all of this until I had a better idea of what this is and when’s it’s all going to be resolved, so I apologize for holding out. This is a good time to remind you that—hard as it may be to believe, considering some of my blog topics—I do not write publicly about every single adventure in my life.

I’ll be writing again before Thursday, but probably not a whole bunch in the few days after. If I can teach Vic how to post here maybe he’ll let you know how the surgery goes. I should totally make him post pantsless, just to get him back for the awkward CT scans. Ha, nude blogging… oh never mind, he’d probably enjoy it.