The Surgery. Part 6 - But wait, there's more...

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

The decision was made to have surgery. Even though the thought of one surgery scares the crap out of me, the thought of having to have two surgeries would be worse. So I asked Dr. OB if he could combine his surgery with another surgery that I really needed to get done so I could just get both of them over with at one time. The second surgery would be a hemorrhoidectomy.

Yes, people, I have hemorrhoids. I never had any kind of butt issues until after I had kids, specifically Macey. Lily was a C-section because she was breech, so there was no pushing involved in her birth, and my hieney came through unscathed. However Macey was a regular vaginal birth and I pushed that 8 plus pound baby out. All that pushing put too much strain on my butthole, and when Dr. OB was sewing me up after the birth he said "Oh, dear, you've got some really bad hemorrhoids here. You might have to have something done with those."

I didn't think anything of it, and didn't have a problem until last year. But then oh boy, did I have a problem. Everyone knows about hemorrhoids, and has seen the Preparation H commercials, but until you get them you don't know how painful they can be. Holy mother of god did mine hurt.

Allow me to get technical here. Everyone has hemorrhoids, which are blood vessels inside the colon just beyond the anus. These veins can get inflamed, and even burst open and cause people to have rectal bleeding. These are internal hemorrhoids, and sometimes they can get so inflamed that they droop, like a little sack, out of the butthole. Applying Preparation H will cause these to shrink back up where they belong. Problem solved.

I didn't have this kind. What happened to me was, when I had Macey my internal hemorrhoids got put under so much pressure that blood was pushed outside of my butthole into a little tissue cavity. It made a blueberry looking thing outside of my butt that was swollen and full of blood. This is called an externally thrombosed hemorrhoid, and when that blood clots it has nowhere to go. And that hurts a whole lot. When Macey was born I was on a constant stream of anti-inflammatories which kept the pain at bay. Eventually the blood clots were reabsorbed, leaving behind two empty flaps of skin called skin tags. These skin tags just hang out (no pun intended) and will fill up with blood again if there is another big pressure on the internal hemorrhoids.

Since Macey's birth, starting about a year ago, I have had four episodes of blueberry butt. The pain was enormous, and there was no way I was going to be sitting in a saddle, so riding was right out. No amount of Preparation H would relieve the pain. The only thing that I found to work was a vaginal anti-itch cream that had 10% benzocaine in it. Every episode took about a week to ten days to resolve completely and make sitting, standing, and pooping bearable again. The only thing I can attribute these eipsodes to is too much standing. Unfortunately my job sometimes requires that I stand for long periods of time, and I don't know when that's going to happen. I knew that I had to get my butthole fixed, because I couldn't deal with an outbreak every time I had to stand a lot.

I asked Dr. OB to recommend someone to do the surgery, and he gave me the name of a colorectal surgeon. It was time for a rectal exam. Oh goodie.

Part 7 - Dr. Colon