Butt drains suck

Yesterday I went to see my surgeon Don about my butt drain. I needed some assurance from a medical professional that a) everything was going well and my drain is performing normally and b) there will be a time in my life that I don't have a tube coming out of my butt cheek. So I arranged a time to meet Don in the minor emergency department at the foothills hospital. When we met up I explained all that was going on and told him about my need for some reassurance. I expected him to say all was well but it turns out he was concerned with the on-again off-again flow coming out of the drain (sometimes it would go days or weeks without draining any fluid and then a big pulse of fluid would come out and then nothing again for a few days). He decided to phone down to interventional radiology (the people who put in the drains) and see if they had time to check out the function of my drain and possibly replace it. As luck would have it, they had time to see me in about an hour so I headed down there to wait. Once I got into the room, they called Don to come down and watch for himself what was going on. As usual when they mess around with my drain its very painful so they loaded me up on fentanyl and set to work. Fist they did a sineogram to test and make sure that there was no communication with my colon. If you recall I've had 3 sineograms before on this drain, all of which showed no communication with the colon. This one however turned up a different result. Once they put the dye in the drain it was obvious to them right away that there was communication with the colon. So they flushed out the drain (only partially since some of the holes were blocked) and abscess, inserted a wire in the old drain, pulled that drain out and then inserted a new drain over the wire that was in place. So now I have a new drain in my butt in a slightly different place than the old one. Hopefully it works better than the old one.

As I'm sure you can imagine, having a colon that leaks fluid out into my body cavity is not a good thing. The hope is that the hole will heal itself but if that doesn't happen I may need surgery to either repair the hole or, if that's not possible, create a permanent colostomy. Obviously I'm hoping for the hole to heal itself but who knows what will happen. I'm also not sure what this all means for starting my chemo. I know they won't want to start it while I have an infection but I'm not sure how long they will wait. Hopefully they don't have to wait until my colon is fixed because I have a feeling that could be a long time.

This morning we got up and headed down to the stampede parade with Granny and Grandad. It was good fun to get out of the house and see something different. As usual I think the bus ride downtown was the highlight for the wee folks.