Surgery Success!

Thank you all so much for your patience as I have processed, talked to both sets of parents, processed, helped take care of a very silly and confused Robbie, processed, watched Parenthood on the laptop in Robbie's room, gone out to transfer my kiddos from one friend's car to another and processed some more.

Surgery was actually fairly quick this afternoon, lasting just about an hour.  When the surgeon came out of the OR area he breezed right past me toward the exit and I thought that he was going to leave without talking to me!  So in my shameless way I stalked him down the hall...  Fortunately he was just talking to two other families before coming back to me.  Unfortunately, I'm pretty certain he noticed me skulking (an appropriate distance away) behind the artificial tree confirming any suspicions that he may have already had about my questionable mental status.

Here is where I warn you that if you are squeemish about seeing someone's insides TURN AWAY, TURN AWAY!

Alright.  For the two of you still here:

This is what the doc found when he got inside.  This is Robbie's abdominal wall.  See it?  Nope.  Me neither.

Until he showed me this.  This is what it is supposed to look like and what it did look like when he was done.  The area with the pattern to it is the mesh that they placed as part of the hernia repair.  All of that mesh was completely covered with adhesions.

Wikipedia explains adhesions much better than I could:  Adhesions are fibrous bands that form between tissues and organs, often as a result of injury during surgery. They may be thought of as internal scar tissue that connects tissues not normally connected.

Here you can see that healthy, integrated (that's what the doc called it) mesh in the top portion of the photo and the adhesion at the bottom as it was being peeled away.  Notice the stringy appearance where it is attached to the abdominal wall.  Ick!

  

So, the surgeon basically said that there were adhesions throughout the abdominal wall.  He said that he "cleaned them up" and likelihood of reoccurrence is low -- although the occurrence at all is relatively uncommon.   Imagine that.  Robbie have a rare medical issue?!?!  Anyway, as long as the adhesions don't reappear this should take care of that daily, constant, diffuse abdominal pain he's been having!  The surgeon also followed the entire length of Robbie's bowel and stated that he found 3 or 4 spots where it was adhesed together that he "snipped."  Which should help relieve/prevent from happening the bowel obstructions. 

So how did this all happen in the first place?  Well, we don't know.  Doc was explaining that when they place the mesh in the belly it creates an inflammatory response -- sort of like the body is trying to "reject" the mesh.  That is no longer happening here, but it may have immediately after the mesh was placed. Part of why reoccurrence is so low.  If new mesh isn't being placed then there isn't going to be that big inflammatory response from the surrounding tissue. Another thought that my mom had is that the Valley Fever that Robbie also currently has (another blog post explaining comes soon) causes inflammation throughout the body. So it is very possible that the Valley Fever inflammation helped in creating the "perfect environment" for adhesions to form.

So now we wait and heal and hopefully don't re-adhese.  We pray and eat and rest.  So far this recovery already feels to completely differently to last time.  But right now I keep falling asleep at the keyboard so I will go sleep and keep y'all posted tomorrow,