Still home recovering

I ended up having surgery on the night of October 19^th, came home the following Monday, and I won't be back to work until November 12^th.

The surgery was done as an emergency when the doctor finally saw on a new CAT scan that my colon was not where it was supposed to be, but was instead flipped up next to my stomach. He also saw an anomaly around the stomach, but felt like that was just a fluke.

It turned out that the fluke was the real deal: my omentum had inexplicably twisted on its axis and a part of it had died as a consequence of the blood flow getting cut. The omentum had then inflamed the entire area and pulled up the colon to its new location. Once the part of the omentum that had died was removed, the colon went back to its normal location and everything else looked fine.

It's nice to know the problem is fixed, even though the recovery is quite slow. I hope I'll feel up to go to work in a week, because I don't really have a way of delaying that any further.

My biggest regret is that the surgeon went in thinking he had to do one thing, and it turned out to be something quite different, but at that point the incision had been made, and it's much longer than it would have been necessary if he had known what the problem really was.

I can't really blame him though. He told me he has no idea how this happened and has never seen anything like it in over 20 years of surgeries, unless in people who had previously had abdominal surgeries and therefore had some scar tissue, which could cause this kind of twisting motion. A nurse told me the same thing.

And then I also read on an internet article that since omental torsion was first reported in 1899, there have been less than 250 such cases. Also, this condition is so rare that its rate of successful pre-operative diagnosis is between 0.6 and 4.8%. That's very low unfortunately.

I guess I'll just have to get used to seeing this huge scar in the middle of my abdomen from now on. It won't be easy, but it could be worse.