I had my surgery july 7th at 12:35pm and everything went well! I stayed two nights in the hospital.The first night was a little painful but by the second night I had almost no pain. I had more pain from being in an uncomfortable bed than from the actual wounds from the surgery. I ended up getting five little lines in my stomach with staples. After I left the hospital I basically waited until July 14th to get the staples taken out. The taken out of the staples was pretty normal, nothing out of the ordinary happened. I was feeling great and the doctor didn't see nothing wrong with me.
Everything COMPLETELY changed a day later (July 15th). I started feeling tired and weak the whole day. About 6pm I got this really strong urge to go to the restroom and to have a bowel movement so I went. All that it came out was liquid pretty much and a few soft pieces but other than that i was thinking that it was your "normal" diarrhea and man was I wrong!
When I was done with my bowl movement, I got up and all of the sudden everything started moving like crazy. I had my eyes open but everything started closing in on me and I started losing my hearing. I had no idea what was happening and it definitely freaked me out. The next thing I remember is me waking up in the floor and sound starting to come back to my ears. I looked around and that's when I realized that I must have passed out or something. I didn't know what to think since I have never felt something like that before to the point that at one moment I thought I was going to die or something. I looked in the toilet and all I saw was blood and lots of clots too. I tried to get on my knees to get up and then I noticed that there was blood and clots where i was sitting. It must have come out when I fell. As I was trying to get up I had the same sensation I had when I first fell but this time I was able to stay conscious and I just sat back down in the floor. I tried calling my mom (live with parents) but she didn't hear me, which was probably because even though i felt that I was screaming, I was probably too weak to actually scream. I didn't want to try to get up again because I was afraid that I was going to pass out again so I crawl my way to the door to unlock it and I used my cell phone to call my mom to come and give me a hand. My mom came to the restroom but of course I wasn't expecting for her to get me up because she is not that strong and I am a pretty big guy. She gave me some water and pointed a fan at me and that made me feel sooo much better. After a minute or two that I was finally able to feel good enough to call 911. I was a little hesitant because I have never needed to call 911 at all but at the same time I was scared enough to know that I needed to call because it was probably something serious.
Help arrived extremely quickly which I was extremely glad and pleasantly surprised. They helped me get up but I had to sit really quickly. Every time I would try to get up I would feel like I was going to pass out. They checked my vitals and then I was heading to the hospital (same one as the surgery). I was fine while in the bed and everything but apparently my blood pressure was extremely low so they had to put me upside down for a little while and they put two IVs which pumped a lot of freezing cold liquid inside of me that made me start shivering and shaking. After a while I started feeling that urge to go to have another bowel movement and I got instantly nervous because I knew it was going to be more blood and I was scared of losing consciousness again. They basically tried to get me up twice to use the toilet and both of the times I was on the verge of passing out but with the nurse's help I was able to stay conscious by breathing it out. When I finally was able to go to the restroom, my suspicious were true because all I saw was blood and blood clots.
At that point, they took me to do a test where they took some blood out and they put some radioactive stuff in the blood and put the blood back into my body to see how the blood would travel and find the source of the bleeding. The test was inconclusive so I was transferred from the ER to ICU because my hemoglobin levels were getting low from losing blood. They ended up giving a blood transfusion (two bags) to counteract the blood I was losing every time I went to the restroom and I also got a bunch of medicine and stuff in the IV. The next day I got an endoscopy to see what the hell was bleeding.
The endoscopy showed that I had developed an ulcer next to the stitches from the surgery. The doctors told me that they preferred for me to stay in the ICU and see if the ulcer could heal with medicine because if they go in to try to fix it they might make it worse since it was a very sensitive area and that if they did make it worse they would have to reverse my gastric bypass surgery so they wanted to wait a few days to be checking to see if i kept pooping blood and to check my hemoglobin levels. Turns out that my ulcer and hemoglobin levels were getting better and I started to poop less and less blood which was always good. While I was in the hospital one of my incisions in my stomach opened a little (minimal bleeding) but they told me not to worry and they patched it up quick.
I ended up staying in the hospital from July 15th to July 20th which it was a lot for me who has only been admitted to a hospital once before (the day of my gastric bypass). I am just glad everything went well when it had so many opportunities of going wrong. I am glad to be home even though I am not 100% yet but I am getting there day by day. I really hope this is the only complication I have and that everything goes smoothly from now on.
On a little side note, my brother who was planning to have gastric bypass by October but I guess with all that happened with me made him lost quite a lot of motivation which sucks but I guess it would be understandable and I would probably be the same way if the roles were reversed.
Anyway, I'll keep updating the blog and hopefully now it would only be good things on here.
H.D.
