Lot's to update! But too much for 1 sitting, so I am going to break it up. This particular post will be alll about my health. It'll get gruesome...so I'll hide it for those that dont want to read about it. For those that do read, though, be warned that you'll never be able to unlearn those things about me. Certainly not for the faint of heart. Anyways, shall we?
And, by the way, this post is gonna sound really complainy....so just bear with me.
So my time in Indonesia has been loads of fun, but I always have digestive tract...issues...whenever I come here. It was mostly just stomach aches and loose stools, your usual traveller's diarrhea. Then it got worse. I would eat, then about 1-2 hours later I would be in pain. The pain made it so I felt really sick, as if i was nauseous. But I never threw up. I would just spend three hours on my bed because I couldn't really do anything else. I thought it was just some sort of bug (I had something similar the last time I went to Indonesia, it eventually disappeared). I thought I'd just wait it out.
The problem with waiting it out was that I really couldn't eat anything in the meantime. Eat a meal? Boom stomach pain and a wasted afternoon. A handful of fruit? Nope. I resorted to drinking a formula of Ensure each morning (in hopes that I could stave off malnutrition for a while) and a few bites of things here and there. It was a serious deficit of calories though...so I resorted going to a doctor on the insistence of my family.
Stomach Ulcer(s)(the wikipedia page is called Peptic Ulcer), apparently. Or somewhere in my gut. They prescribed be a drug called omeprazole that I take before I eat. Works like magic! And apparently my mom and grandma on my mom's side has had this problem before. So the omeprazole definitely keeps the pain pretty much gone. If i forget to take the pill though...hurts like it was day one again...haha.
So that was the stomach problem. Now for the butt problem!
Here is the quick and clean version: I had something in my behind that made it really hard to sit down. After about 2 weeks of this, the something started to swell like crazy. I went to the doctor, and he said is was from an infection, due to my poor diet (great, thanks tummy). It was an abscess, which meant it was filled with, yup, pus! gross huh? Oh we haven't even started yet. The doctor gave me antibiotics and told me to eat more fiber and drink more water. Things got worse and I went to see the doctor again the next day (I could barely walk at this point). He looked at it, poked it, and said it was surgery time. You can look up "fistulotomy" if you want a better understand of what was wrong with me. Well I underwent surgery that night, I was discharged the next day, and I am still in recovery mode. Surgery was Wednesday night, this is currently Monday night. Lets just say recovery is a pain in the butt!
This is the long version of what happened. Read at your own risk.
STARTS HERE------->
So the abscess was located right next to my anus, like about a centimeter away. The swelling was disgusting, just this huge freaking lump right on my butt. I couldn't sit down. After my trip to the doctor, the swelling got worse. That night, the pressure from the swelling got so intense, I couldn't sleep. I could barely even walk. My abscess was hot to the touch and throbbing. I was crying, and I don't cry from pain tooooo often (cuz I'm such a manly guy). I went to the ER at the hospital, limping in, tears just streaming down my face. I struggled onto the gurney thing. They had me pull my pants off and turned me over to examine the abscess. That was when I felt it. As they turned me, it felt like a knife plunged into my abscess. The ER docs and nurses asked where it was. I was very confused, as I thought a huge bulge would be pretty obvious. They poked around, prodding different...areas.... which only added to my confusion. How could they miss this swollen bulge growing out of my ass?! I had to point it out, telling them this is where it hurt. So, of course, they gave it a few good pokes, to my increasing dismay. They turned me back around, pulled up my pants, and said they couldn't do anything for me at the moment. They gave me a shot of acetaminophen (that's just Tylenol, by the way) and told me to contact a specialist in the morning. The weird thing was that my abscess didn't hurt quite as much, and I noticed this before they gave me my pain shot. I have a feeling something, somewhere must have popped. It was hard to tell with my tears and screaming and terror sweat though.
Well, I went home and managed to fall asleep. I was up the next morning asking if we could go to the specialist right away, seeing as that abscess could start swelling again. If you recall, my experience had taught me that we really didn't want that happening again. The family said that we would have to wait till 4 pm to see the doctor that I had seen the day before. Oh, the one who just gave me antibiotics and sent me home? Yup. So I spent my day in bed, and all I can say is that I am sure as hell glad Tylenol actually works as a pain med! I never take pain meds, so they are kind of like this magical thing to me now. I could feel my abscess growing, though, just as it had done the day before.
We got to the doctor, and he said we needed to wait an hour for him (he was in the middle of a surgery, so I guess he kind of had a good excuse). 2 hours later, he called me in and looked at the abscess. He poked it, and said yup, I'd need to stay the night.
Haha, wait, stay the night?
Why?
Surgery.
oh
Me and my aunt spent a while looking for a room for me to stay in at the hospital, cuz they are like an airline and like to overbook apparently. After two hours, they took me to my overnight room, which I will admit was quite nice. I signed some papers (oh what? Anaesthetics can kill? Okay yes I'll sign my life away, sure, just make the pain stop) and was off to surgery. That was fast.
I found out that I was only going under local anaesthesia, which meant they only numbed me from my torso down. They put in an IV line (on the second try, mind you. And here's a tip, if you miss the vein, don't dig around for it. My hand is still swollen because of the needle that just wreaked havoc on my hand veins). Then the anaesthetist gave me my spinal injections, which, as it turns out, hurt. I don't exactly know what happened next because I started to hallucinate and the ceiling started to start doing a wave thing. After sometime, I started to piece things together. I was drugged up with something, and it felt absolutely amazing. My legs felt like they were locked in pillows and my arms were strapped down. I looked around and I could see the anaesthesiologist. Naturally, I called him over and asked him what was going on. He told me we were twenty minutes into the surgery. I looked down and noticed that there were some green curtains up and I couldn't see anything. I then talked to the doctor about want to be a doctor and we had quite a pleasant conversation during my surgery.
I was eventually carted back to my room, still quite awake and rather...high. I fell asleep before the anaesthesia wore off, and slept with a night full of hallucinations of people being in my room. It was jolly good fun. The numbness wore off around 6 am, which was a logical time for me to wake up as the pain was rather...strong. It felt like I had the worst wedgie, mixed with blood, of course. I then realized I hadn't gone poop for about 3 days...which couldn't be good...so I had the nurse try to help me. It ended in failure, as in no Bowel Movement. Then they took the three tampons that had been stuffed up my butt out of my butt. Why they didn't do that before I tried to poop is beyond me. Luckily it didn't lead to anything more coming out of my butt, though. I bled over the rest of the floor as I hobbled back to bed.
Some of my doctor friends from the hospital I am observing at stopped by to say hi and see how I was doing, which I thought was really sweet. Then my family came and see me. Then some of my other friends came, so I wasn't alone. The doctor came by and said I was free to go home if I wanted.
The procedure they did was they cut that abscess open, which let all the pus drain out. The problem, though, is that the infection needs to heal itself. If they close the wound, then it'll just became another abscess. So what can you do? Leave that wound open and let it heal on it's own. So, as it is, I have a cut about an inch and a half long that originates from my anus and goes in the direction of my right leg. Maybe "cut is the wrong word, how about "chunk of skin that is missing." Anyways, its a huge open wound where it's generally quite difficult to keep clean (what with all the poopies and whatnot). It is pretty common for recurrence, such that I would get another abscess. If this thing does not heal properly, in that the skin heals before the infection wound thing heals, I'll have to do surgery again. I'd really rather not have that happen. Remember, though, I am also in Indonesia. Indonesia isn't known for being the cleanest of places, and it has its fair share of exotic bacteria.
So I could stay in the hospital, or go home and try to fend for myself. I elected to go home (I don't like the helplessness of being in a hospital bed).
These last few days have been....rough. I wake up in the morning, spend about 10 minutes that I need to take off the bandage from the night before, cry as it comes off, examine the bandage, take a shower, tenderly wash my wound with soap and water, soak my wound (and butt) in a woefully-small-but-workable metal dish thing with warm water (it's supposed to help?), clean out my wound with a battery of wet wipes, alcohol, and gauze, look at the wound, notice that it doesn't look like anything is changing, apply a salve that's an extract from cow placenta (??? look up bioplacenton, your guess is as good as mine), then apply a gauze bandage in a way that makes it feel like I have a perma-wedgie, and stick two extra Kleenex up there for good measure. I do the whole process in the afternoon and at night again. At first it seemed like a horror movie, but it has gotten better and easier to do. It just takes about 45 minutes :/
"But Aaron, how do you poop?" you may be asking. Well, it's shitty. Every time I poop, you guessed it, poop goes into the wound. There is absolutely no way of preventing this from happening. So I just gotta make super duper sure that I get all the little fecal matters out of the wound before closing it up again. If I don't clean it out enough, or if I don't apply the salve ALL the way into the wound (which means up my anus!), I could get another abscess. And that is what is getting me through this. That if I mess up, I could be back to square one. And I don't want that. Like, I really don't want that.
The doctor said that, if everything goes well, I should be all good to play grab-ass again in 4-6 weeks. So only 4-6 more weeks of this cleaning....hooray
<--------ENDS HERE
But other than these problems, everything is going well! Ill update on the work at the hospital when I feel like writing again haha.
-Aaron Brown
