Coping With Fistulotomy

Since late September, 2006, I felt horrible rectal pain and I had no idea what I was in for. I thought it was just a fissure or something, which is why I went to the store and bought some stool softener and thought about preparation H or hydrocortizone. As a university student in his senior year of college, I hoped that it wasn’t much, until the night I decided to go home when i began having horrible spasms. I swear that i thought I had a ball with shards of glass was being shoved inside of me. I go home and am misdiagnosed with a fissure. I go to another doctor, as I don’t have a family doctor, and he tells me that he thinks it’s an abscess. Within a week I’m taken to the hospital when puss literally begins to spew out of my rectum shortly after a large bump formed on my left buttocks.

To make a long story short, I’ve had 3 surgeries so far, because the first two were only draining of the abscesses with residual infection still remaining. I felt that, after the second surgery, things were going well and that I was recovering. I was scarring up, it seemed, until one day the main surgical incision reoped and began to bleed out mixed with some puss. I cried for hours, my parents desperately trying to console me.

I’m 22, supposed to be a senior enjoying my last year as an undergraduate, and I’m uninsured during the only time in my life that I’ve EVER been with some sort of health problem, and I feel like less of a man for this embarassing situation. Well, as I had mentioned that I’m uninsured, I go to the colorectal clinic at the county hospital. They tell me that I have a same day surgery for them to place a seton (sp?) drain in the surgical incision. The problem is that I had to wait 3 months for this date to come. I had the surgery 8 days ago today, as summer begins to set in and I’m virtually unable to do anything with the ease and normality of before.

This shouldn’t have lasted as long as it has, but at least now I have specialists monitoring my issue. This problem, although benign and in no way has jeopardized my life, has slowly killled my spirits. I do my best to think that I’m still alive, and I should be grateful to be where I am, but I feel as though I have become a recluse, and that I’ve slowly become jaded in some ways.

I know that I’ll be okay in the end, no pun intended, but I just want any man or woman out there know that they are not alone in this. Nobody talks about rectal issues. Come on, it’s taboo. I hope that anyone that reads this and can relate finds the comfort in knowing that this is a test of patience and mental and emotional strength. Please stay as close to your regular routine as possible, you are not any less of a person than before, and when all is better, any obstacle placed in front of you will seem minuscule. Take care.