To Amber - new member

[Guest guest]

Hi Amber,

Welcome.....

Your story is very similar to mine. I also had major abdominal

surgery due to a prior surgery going wrong. The second surgery

was to wash out infection from a burst organ. And, like you

say...the rough handling of the abdominal organs that is part of

the emergency surgery process can be responsible for

damaging the pancreas. Hopefully, like your doctor says, it will

only be a matter of time and it will heal. Those of us on the

board who have had this type of surgery all agree that it is one of

the roughest to recover from. Your intestines and other organs

highly resent being messed with.

In my case, I experienced my first attack of acute pancreatitis as

a result of the surgery. This was unrecognized at the time....only

as I was being discharged was it remarked on that my slow

recovery and complications after the second surgery was due to

pancreatitis. However, this was never officially documented so I

ended up being mis-diagnosed and mis-treated for three years

afterwards until we went full circle and recognized that the

pancreas was the culprit all along. One of the reasons for this,

from what I have learned, is that there is an unwritten " law " that

surgeons who give their patients pancreatitis have somehow

" failed " and are " bad " surgeons. So, for obvious reasons, they

are reluctant to face this possibility....either consciously or

unconsciously. They will try to convince you and themselves that

your symptoms are anything but pancreas related. I am mainly

mentioning this to you so you keep aware that you may need to

be assertive in your quest for treatment and diagnosis.

But that being said..........recovery from this type of surgery is long.

I would say that it may take up to a year for things to settle down.

Your acute pain, if there are no complications, should subside

within weeks or months, but the lingering pain from the surgery

and the scars, etc may take many months to gradually leave. In

addition, your fatigue level will be with you for a long time. You

have to be aware that your body needs time. Alot happened to

you and every part of your body needs to heal. Including your

psyche (this was one of the hardesf to heal for me). You need to

have all the inflammation to be reduced and to get your bowels

to function more normally. In addition, those muscles that were

cut are big ones and they may take a while to knit back together.

But, you need to remember, that you will probably never feel the

same way you did before your surgery. You will always have the

scars that it created - both internally and externally. I have not

even come close to returning to my pre-surgery state of health.

But that is not to say that things haven't gotten better since the

trauma of it.

Basically, I want to say that yes, surgery of that type can cause

pancreatitis, most often it is one episode of acute pancreatitis

and once that heals a person may never be bothered by it again,

but there are instances that this one acute episode can be so

damaging that it morphs into chronic pancreaitis. But in your

case, unless there is overwhelming evidence to show that

chronic pancreatitis has set in, it is most likely too soon to say

that this is the path that you are on.

Feel free to ask me any questions about my experiences with

diagnosing and treating my pancreatitis that occured as a result

of my surgery.

laurie