What I have in common with BP

I officially left the Borg collective 3 weeks ago. It was a simple outpatient procedure done in the GI docs office to take the PEG tube out. Big time yippee! for that. Normally the hole for the PEG tube closes all by itself in 2-3 days and completely heals over in about 2 weeks essentially leaving you with a second belly button and some interesting body piercing options. However in keeping with my goal of trying to experience all aspects of this my hole decided to not completely close up. Here is where the resemblance to BP's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico starts. Keep in mind that this is smaller than a pin hole and while it does leak it isn't gushing or anything.

The automatic closing method is something like the blowout preventer. It's just supposed to work. During that time I am supposed to eat small meals to help minimize anything leaking out. Unfortunately I tend to need to drink a lot of water to eat so it makes it a bit more challenging. To help I started drinking Ensure again to keep the calorie count up. They like to give it a few weeks to close over before going to plan B, what I call the top kill method. Plan B involves chemical cauterization. Basically they use silver nitrate to try to "encourage" the hole to close. The silver nitrate stick looks like a long match stick, sort of like what you would use to light a fireplace. They take the stick and wiggle it around in the hole. The silver nitrate on the stick reacts with any moister present and converts to acid that burns away some of the tissue. These exposes "fresh" tissue to try to heal over the hole. It's a simple procedure but it does temporarily hurt quite a bit.

Unfortunately the top kill method didn't work either. The normal course of action in this situation is to try the silver nitrate approach a few times with a week between attempts before moving on the plan C. From what I have read it appears that if it doesn't work the first time it most likely isn't going to work. I am on a bit of a crunch for time in getting this resolved so we are moving to the the next step this upcoming week.

Plan C, drill a relief well. The third, and hopefully last step, in the process is a minor outpatient surgery procedure. (Fortunately they do use a local anesthesia for this one!) Here they clean out the hole so it will heal over and seal it with a stitch. Depending upon how deep they have to go I will be sore for a few days to a week. However supposedly because they have closed it with a stitch I can go back to eating they way I used to. One downside is that I tend to drink a lot of water when eating and can cough quite a bit at times. This causes obvious problems with the "well" so I have throttled back my eating and rely on Ensure for most of my calories though I do occasional go off the wagon like last night at Buffalo Wild Wings and had a pulled pork slider. (Yep, I do live life on the wild side, pun intended.) Because of the altered diet I have dropped about 10 pounds in 3 weeks. While a very effective weight loss program it wasn't something I was looking to do.

So to recap. Here is how things went.

Phase 1: Blowout Preventer Phase

Remove tube, hole should close automatically in 2-3 days and be completed healed within 2 weeks.

Phase 2: Top Kill Method

After 3 weeks perform chemical cauterization with silver nitrate sticks. Should seal up in 1-2 days.

Phase 3: Relief Well

Clean out hole in outpatient surgery procedure and seal with a stitch. Recovery time 3-7 days.