Scars answered

A few of you saw the picture of my belly that Deb posted on FB, and asked about the stories behind them.  The photo is below as well.  This may be another case of TMI, so stop now if you don't want the history of my belly...

Well, here it goes..

My scars, at least the visible ones, are easily described.  The noticeable lone horizontal from near my navel running to a little past the middle of the left side is from the mid 1960’s when I had my spleen removed.  In this pic it just looks like a dark line.  As it turns out this was an unneeded surgery.  The intent was to help mitigate my chronic anemia.  The belief was that the spleen was unnecessarily filtering out blood cells.  This is true for some types of anemia, but not mine.  After the surgery I was sent to Children’s Hospital in Boston, where I was pronounced to have a Glouse-6-phosphate-dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency. G6PD deficiency is fairly common and is usually only noticed if the wrong medication is taken.  My form is a rare type and my red blood cells break down all the time roughly twice as fast as normal red blood cells.

The short, fat, vertical scar too is from the 1960’s, I’ll guess at 1968.  Gallstones developed and my gallbladder had to come out.  There was some ‘new’ technique for closing the incision with a sort of glue, but it wore off kind of quick and left a wide scar.

In the 90’s I had a number of endoscopic procedures to clear my bile duct of obstructions.  There were large amounts of bili-stones (they can form when your red blood cells break down) that made sludge which would block up the duct and cause a good amount of pain.  The ERCPs (acronym for the procedure) cleared things pretty well, but needed to be repeated.  I think I had over a dozen.  The last one was botched in Aug of 2001.  The doc was only supposed to pull out the sludge, but he decided to cut the opening to the bile duct at the intestine a little further.  (it had be cut to be permanently open to allow the sludge to pass through it – normally the valve there opens when the gall bladder constricts allowing the bile to enter the duct.)  When he cut, he cut through the intestine and also hit an artery.  I went through angio procedure to control the bleeding, and was sent home a day and a half later.  There were still signs of internal bleeding, but no one was convinced there was a problem till one night when I vomited a toilet bowl full of blood.  I was rushed to the St. Mary’s ER.   My vital signs were okay initially, but the doc put a tube down my stomach and quickly realized I was bleeding pretty good.  Things got pretty chaotic.  I remember my Pastor giving me communion before she was kicked out of the room.  I was sedated, and I’m told I was draining the place dry of blood.  It was driven in by police and flown in by State Police.  After they got me stable, I was flown out.  Deb was told I was going to Washington Hospital Center, but when she got there she found I was rerouted in-flight to Georgetown.  I woke in ICU and found that I had 4 hours of surgery and 4 hours of angio.  The surgery repaired the duodenum, and the angio place a couple titanium coils in blood vessels to stop the rest of the bleeding.  The longest vertical scar is my reminder of that time of life, it starts just below my breast bone and goes a long way down.  It took my breath away the first time I gained the courage to look beneath my gown to see the railroad track of staples holding me together.  The healing took a long time and it was the first time that my liver issues started to really surface.  There was debate about my blood tests results and the fact that I’m always anemic overshadowed the liver function tests.  Anyway, it took a long time to heal from that, and included a 40 day episode of IV nutrition.  I was in and out of the hospital for quite a while – I became almost more comfortable there than at home.  The doc finally said that I couldn’t be in there and that people staying that long usually leave horizontally.  So, I went home with my 108 pound body!!  I did truly look like a holocaust victim.  So picture me now – pretty thin, and take another 22 pounds off.  I still can remember the staff calling me miracle man.  I still have the T-shirt with many signatures from nurses and attending physicians tucked away at home.  There’s a bit of a burden to being called that, especially by a seasoned trauma surgeon.  I never asked for the details of why they called me that, but was told “you have a strong heart.”  I’ve since let go of the burden by realizing the Bible talks a lot about the miracles of Jesus, but never really about what those receiving the miracles did with their lives.  Perhaps it was enough to be a source of hope by being the miracle?

The last scar is the curving mostly horizontal lines from the left and right meet up with the other vertical line in the center of my body.  This is the remnant of my liver transplant in 2005.  Some try to say it’s a Mercedes Benz symbol, but I don’t get that.  One transplant recipient told someone it was due to a shark attack – I like that better.

I'm afraid I may need to add another scar to the mix sometime soon, not sure where it will fit!

If you have more questions, let me know.

Peace,

Brian