Back With A Vengeance

To my son Tommy,

Your mom had a colonoscopy yesterday.  They wanted a different view to see why your mom is having all the complications.  So, in essence, the doctors took their head out of their own butts, and gave a look see up your mom's.  What they found surprised all of us.

They got to the anastomosis (that is a medical term for where they cut out and restitched together the tubes in her bowel)  and everything looked okay.  But a quarter of an inch farther was blocked.  The inflamation had swollen the small intestine so much that the camera couldn't go any farther.  The doctor was forced to do some blind cuts and pull them out for biopsy, results pending.  The surgeon took out more than we expected during the surgery so we definitely figured he had gotten it all.  So the only explanation is that is came back that quickly and with that much force.

This bowel resection surgery is supposed to give relief from crohn's disease for 5 to 7 to 10 years.  You cut it out and the slow the regrowth with pharmaceuticals and diet.  But this, this is like shaving your beard at 6am and having a ZZ Top type beard again by noon.  I will include a picture of ZZ Top to this letter in case I didn't raise you right and when you finally read this you don't understand the old pop culture reference.  The point being is the fast return is just not supposed to happen that way.

To complicate things further, your mother with her open wound from the surgery is in a pickle.  She is unable to take the normal medicines that you would use to fight crohn's because they would stop her wound from healing.  Even the prednisone that she is going back on will slow the wound healing.  So no Humira (even though that had stopped working and we weren't going back to it) and no Remicade and no real solutions exist until her wound gets sorted out.  So there your mom sits, in that purgatory that exists when no one is sure of how to proceed and it seems there are no answers.

Sincerely with love from your dad,
Leo