Drilling a Relief Well

I had the relief well done last Tuesday. This method involves traditional surgery with a local anesthetic. (Talk about a strange feeling, having someone poke around in your stomach while you are lying on an operating table. No pain during the procedure but you can feel the tugging. I definitely prefer sedation with the amnesia effect. Of course I would prefer that for lots of things....:-)) In this case the surgeon removes the tissue around the PEG tube hole including the hole itself and separates the stomach from the wall of skin. (With a PEG tube those bind together permanently.) He then sews up the stomach, muscle and skin separately. No more second belly button and all of the interesting piercing opportunities for me. Instead I get a 3/4 inch horizontal scar.

All in it took only 45 minutes but was probably the most stressful part of this whole thing. For some reason this bothered me more than anything else I have gone through. I was clutching the side of the operating table so hard during the procedure that my forearms hurt afterward. Nothing in all of this, CT Scans, biopsies or anything got to me as much as this did for some reason. It still gives me the heebie geebies (note my deft use of technical medical terms.) to think about it. On the plus side this is pretty much a guarantee fix. I need to take it easy for a few days but by the end of this weekend the soreness should be gone and I can pretty much do anything but strenuous ab exercises. (My new excuse for not having 6 pack abs, the doctor won't let me.) After about 3-4 weeks I can do whatever I want.

The normal time line for this type of process is to take at least 4 weeks to see if the hole will close by itself. Then another 3 to 4 weeks with the silver nitrate and then the surgery. I accelerated it a bit and jumped to the surgery after 4 and a half weeks. From what I have read when you have a tube as long as I had and it doesn't close up quickly it probably isn't going to and you end up going the surgery route. As much fun as the silver nitrate sticks were I couldn't see doing that another 2 times. It appears to be healing over nicely however I am going to wait until 3 full days have gone by until I start testing it out with "normal" foods.