People keep asking how a healthy person like myself ends up in the hospital twice in one year. My response is, right??!!! I’m the person who gets appendicitis DURING abdominal therapy training, incorporates it into my practice for almost a year and then ends up in the ER again for a gut issue. The universe has an interesting sense of humor.
But here’s the story...
When you have an appendectomy you figure, ok, it’s done. My appendix can never cause me trouble again. Now all I have to do is heal from surgery. Nope. What they don’t tell you is that the scar tissue can give you trouble in a year or five or twenty five years sometimes. Probably, they don’t tell you that, because what “they” don’t know, is a lot.
I blogged about my Belizean appendectomy last winter. I came home, I made some castor oil salve, and I started again with my abdominal massage and working on my scar tissue which was spreading more than I’d anticipated. This worked great! It broke up and stretched out and felt better and I continued doing it all year until I got lazy and then lazier in October/November. Probably would’ve been better to do it diligently for a solid year. Hindsight blah blah blah.
Then one day in early December I was thrown into worse pain than appendicitis. Went to the ER in Red Lodge, thank you Burt and Donna for driving me in the direction of pain meds!... thank you modern medicine FOR pain meds!!!! Tests followed of course and then had an ambulance ride to Billings. Yay for more pain meds! I had a kink in my small intestine in the lower right side. 95% of these are caused by scar tissue, or something like that. “They” said so. I spent four days in the hospital.
Gotta say, Nate is the best partner to have when this kind of thing happens...twice in one year. He’s so chill! He never freaks out or asks me a bunch of annoying questions. He just sits and naps and gets whatever I need and goes for coffee and food for himself and doesn’t complain about the horrible recliner he has to sleep in and holds my hand when I fall apart. I forgive him for the horrible video of the doctor pulling the NG tube out of my nose. Just kidding, I’m considering loading it here actually.
So I avoided surgery for the time and got to go home with a prognosis of, “maybe you’ll be fine and this will never happen again”. It didn’t really end when I left the hospital but I am on the mend. Though I’m not 100% and it DID happen again about four or five days after I left the hospital, the surgeon and I decided that surgery is not necessary at this time and that I should just continue to heal and take some time to do so. I had no veins left anyway after what ended up being 2 ER visits because of the kink and one visit to have laparoscopic exploratory surgery in which a different surgeon decided not to come in (which still resulted in an IV and blood draws and an ultrasound to find a viable vein). It was tough enough to decide to have the surgery, follow my surgeon’s advice and go in on a Saturday, be poked at all over again, and then be turned away. It’s almost comical and obviously a blessing in disguise. After all that, I was definitely of the thinking that I needed some time! Of course, I don’t take physical ailments or dis-ease as just being simple physical ailments. Particulary when they involve complex dynamics like the gut, but really anything has something to tell us; some treasure to find in the trauma. And my gut has had its troubles over the years.
Long journey/story short, my amazing friend Christina Love of Earth’s Legacy who is a colon hydro therapist in Arizona and knows me quite well, immediately knew there was more going on than just rogue scar tissue. I’m sure she’s right, she almost always is (I can’t say always or I can never argue with her again!).
I am home and about to take my third trip to Bozeman for colonics. It’s been a loooooong time. Ten years since the last and almost another ten years before that. It seems that journey I started with Christina almost twenty years ago continues, it seems with the same dis-ease that we never fully resolved because I bolted for Montana as soon as I was done with massage school. The body is incredible!! All these years and it just this past year decided to bite back, with an angry appendix. Yes, I know “they” say the appendix has no purpose and appendicitis has no known cause. Find a colon therapist that agrees with that and I’ll tell you to find a different colon therapist!
Next time, I’ll explain what in the world I’m talking about, what is going on, and what my goal is - I’m guessing I’m not the only one that’s been walking around ignoring something for years, while still being healthy and taking care of themselves in so many other ways. This ability to be healthy and have so much imbalance at the same time can be frustrating.
Recent photos of what we missed while in the hospital, what we gained after the hospital, and one gross video...
Don't watch if you are easily grossed out. And take care of your gut beyond imagination so this never happens to you!