It has been a week.........and no bleeding!!!!

[Guest guest]

Hi Everyone

It has been over a week now and no more signs or traces of bleeding which

means no more trips to the OR. I guess the last trip did it. It was more of

an inconvenience. The remaining stitches have been removed and the one that

kept bleeding has a nice scab covering it (sorry to be so graphic!) Still in

quite a bit of pain from the hematomas under the skin, but will just have to

wait for them to be absorbed, could take as long as 6 months before

everything is absorbed. He still has me on pretty good pain medicine so

hopefully I can begin to taper this off shortly. The surgeon feels it will

only be a few months before I am back in his OR for hip surgery, but I prefer

to think in terms of years.

Hope everyone had a safe and wonderful holiday with family and friends. Mine

was very quiet with the kids having some of their friends over for a cook

out. It didn't rain until late evening. We started out with a family

breakfast at a local diner, so nothing very exciting.

FINALLY, spoke to the hematologist, he apologized for taking so long to get

back to me, he thought he had spoken with me before he left on his trip. The

additional tests indicate that I am severely anemic and have absolutely no

iron in my system and this is causing my platelets to rise so high. Right

now, he wants me to be scoped by a GI doc (which I knew I had to do for quite

some time and have been conveniently avoiding) and I will be receiving IV

iron infusions once a month until a turn is seen in my blood work. He also

felt that the medication that I am taking, mainly the Celebrex and prednisone

are not helping my condition. If the scope turns up nothing, then they will

proceed to a bone marrow biopsy and check for a hidden tumor behind the

pancreas or liver. I had this exact same situation occur before I was even

diagnosed about 18 years ago. They scoped me from one end to the other and

nothing showed up. Yet I was totally iron depleted. The doctor who was

treating me at the time and I had words and I never followed up with the

tumor thing and then I started to have my family and things were attributed

to that and then I had all those major surgeries and no one went very in

depth to the situation like the hematologist is. He wanted to send his

report to that GI doc that I used to see that gave me all that grief who I

bumped into a few months ago and I told him NO WAY, so I have another GI doc

with Ron's insurance plan that I had chosen as my primary anyway that he will

send the report to plus he is also sending it to my nephrologist . I truly

feel this time that they will get answers for this problem and I won't let it

just be swept under the carpet again. This probably explains why I am still

feeling so weak and drained since the surgery. At least I know it is

something that they can treat and treat it without surgery! I tend to think

I have probably developed an ulcer in my upper GI tract as I have been seeing

signs for a while that things were not quite right, so this is not a big

surprise. I just didn't think it had gotten this bad.

Once again, thank you all for you good wishes and prayers they were so

appreciated and God has answered them. You are all so special to me!

Gentle, tender, angel hugs to all,

Debs in FL