Stent Replacement

[Guest guest]

Hello;

My wife has a stent for nearly three months now. We talked with her doctor and

he said that we should visit him for stent raplacement on Monday 3rd October.

I can say that my wife feels relatively better since she had a stent for her CP.

She has still constant pain but within these three months we only needed to go

to ER for one time. This was the time when she ate a salad made from mostly

boiled patatoes. I don't know if any of you had the same experience but this is

the second time she was sick after eating boiled patatoes. So we decided to add

one more thing to our prohibited meals list. Do we have a database for this kind

of meals which can potentially trigger an attack. For example fish or anything

from the sea also isn't good for her. We believe that it may be related with

phosphorus that fish has. Ofcourse this may change from one person to another

but a database like this might help..

Anyway my question is about the stents. My wife is relatively o.k at the moment.

If you ask her she is happy with her three month old stent. However as I know

they become ocluded after a while. I would like to know your experience. Did

they put a new one or did they take the old one out and let you go without a

stent for a while?

My wife has started to have stress for Monday's ERCP. She doesn't like the idea

to have ERCP every 3 months for stent replacement.

I wish a painless and happy weekend to all of you.

Mehmet

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[Guest guest]

Hi Mehmet,

I can understand your wife starting to get stressed about the

ERCP. I have had four or five and only the first one went smoothly

on my part (the set-up went bad, but that was the doctor's fault

and caused them more grief than it did to me). But, the thing to

focus on is being able to feel better after the brief spell of feeling

bad from the procedure.

As far as replacing stents...it depends on the doctor who is doing

the stenting. There doesn't seem to be any set way of looking at

this. I think as a general rule...that as long as the patient is

feeling better with the stent (as opposed to the stent making the

patient worse) the doctor will be willing to keep replacing the

stent. Some will replace every two months up to a year or more,

some will only replace for a total or 6 to 8 months and some will

only do it once. Also there is another way of doing it which entails

putting more than one stent in at a time to gradually stretch the

duct open. This is done over 6 months or so, again depending

on how the patient responds.

The reason that there is alot of different ways of doing this is that

there is some concern that stenting may actually do more harm.

Some physicians have found that the duct that had stents in,

acutally shows damage that is similar to the disease

itself...damage that was not there before the stents. It is thought

that maybe the friction or inflammation caused by the stent can

damage the duct...but there is the idea that this may be

temporary change. And then, like you pointed out, there is worry

that an occluded stent can cause a case of acute pancreatitis,

which can lead to all sorts of complications.

In my experience, I had the first stent in for 8 weeks, then the

second one for another 8 weeks. I was suppose to have a third

one for another 8 weeks but the doctor decided for some reason

unknown to me, to stop treating me. In my case, it was a

success in some ways, and a failure in others. But I am glad that

I did it....I wouldn't have been able to live very well without it.

Hope this helps and I wish you and your wife well with her

ERCP!

laurie