I will be having Deep Brain Stimulation in a few months, to control the tremors in my hands. It involves having a metal rod inserted in my brain permanently. There will be a battery in my chest with a wire that runs from it to the metal rod via the side of my neck. A remote control thingy will turn the battery off when I’m not using it.
I have to be awake during the whole procedure.
Nava, this is called an “imperforate anus”, and my now 17 year old daughter was born with it, also. (I was already going to post about it in this thread, but you gave me a great lead in…) Obviously, treatment for it was much different in 1993 than it was for your parents’ friend. The first thing they did for my daughter was give her a colostomy. 4 months later, they did the reconstructive surgery to connect her rectum and create the anus. then about 3 months after that they reversed the colostomy (called a “pull through”). She still has occasional issues (mostly periodic incontinence), but otherwise is perfectly normal. But yes, if they hadn’t done surgery right away, there’s no way she would have survived.
Oh? I didn’t get the procedure since my tumour was found by colonoscopy, but I was told that I had to find the camera and give it back again, it is expensive and has to be reused :p.
I, at the moment, have a portacath, an implant in the breast with a catheter running through the jugular vein and down to the heart where the tubes for the chemotherapy can be connected. Depending on the CT-scan I will get it taken out mid October.
I was told this isn’t all that unusual, but last month I completed a series of steroid injections… the needle going through my eardrum to inject it all into my inner ear! :eek:
It sounds a lot more dramatic than it is. They had this glorious anesthetic cream, I think it’s called MLA, that they’d shoot into my ear first, so I felt nothing as far as the needle goes. But to have a room temperature liquid suddenly fill your inner ear… Wheeeeeeeee! The coolness of the liquid actually felt rather disgusting, and it really produced some wild vertigo because it sloshed over top the semicircular canals which are are your balance/motion/orientation parts. I had to lie on my side for about a half hour, otherwise the steroids would just slide down my eustachian tubes, and then I’d go home.
Didn’t help my issue one bit though, so next up is an MRI.
Best of luck to you. Seeing as how they’ll already have you open, maybe they can put a rod in one of your pleasure centers while they’re at it. 
I had the capsule camera as well, I didn’t have to retrieve it either.
This was part of an effort to determine why I lost blood through my GI system intermittently, including a gastroscopy, endoscopy, CT, the capsule camera, MRI and finally a scintillation “camera” recording a radioactive contrast fluid that found the problem: a Meckel’s diverticulum, similar to an appendix, in which acid-producing gastric cells were located.
The operation itself was relatively simple, very similar to an endoscopic appendix removal. But because my father requested the file when he visited me, I had the opportunity to copy the complete video that was tucked inside on a CD to my laptop. It’s quite disgusting to see when they cut through tissue with a heated hook and you can see cooking tissue and smoke coming off…
I had my urethra operated on when I was a wee lad to prevent bedwetting. Didn’t really help, but I felt some Curious George simpatico.
I had a similar experience. I was sick for two weeks, sleeping and feverish half the time, and sweating my ass off the rest of the time. I threw up everything, even 7Up, and the worst of it was, no one could diagnose what I had (I was back in the States by the time it kicked in). Damn fucking mosquitos. Every doctor thought I had hepatitis, or cholera, or an STD (I was a virgin in every way possible) and finally we went to an Indian doctor who practically diagnosed it over the phone and only had to look at me for 10 minutes to know what was wrong. Quinine, and I was better in days.
jackdavinci, you reminded me - I bedwet until very late, until I was 11 or so. I think there were psychological reasons behind this, but my parents didn’t believe in that stuff. I was in the hospital for a day, and I remember the awful catheter they put in me. And they put so much fluid in my bladder and they wouldn’t let me pee. I still hate them for that.
Geez, Eats Crayons, I wouldn’t be able to let them do that without heavy sedation at the very least. I get nervous when they look into my ears. The ENT I saw last year after I managed to damage my left eardrum (since healed, my hearing’s slightly off but otherwise is fine) said I’m so flinchy about my ears that I must have had a really bad experience as a kid; I know I had a ton of ear infections and whatnot and it’s entirely possible, though I don’t remember any particular experience. I’m told some people enjoy having stuff like earwax removal…I can’t understand in the slightest.
Good luck with getting your issue cleared up. Ear problems suck hard.
Is it any better at all? Do you still hear the “ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee-ee…”?
It seems I’ve regained about 15dB… or not. I still have the tinnitus, but I think it’s quieter, or perhaps I’ve just gotten used to it. I do know that I felt as if I was missing little bits of speech and I don’t feel that as often anymore. It’s possible that my results were 15dB better because the “ee-ee-ee” isn’t as loud and wasn’t masking he “beeps” I was supposed to hear in the test. shrug Not sure yet. Hopefully the MRI will provide a clue.
I believe it was actually worse for my partner. I wanted to be sure I didn’t miss any instructions due to mis-hearing. When I first went to the emergency room as advised by the audiologist who initially assessed me, I did have trouble answering questions because the tinnitus was so loud and distracting, it was hard to hear the questions they were asking me through all the ER background noise. So she came with me to my first injection as an extra set of ears. I was numbed out lying on the table and could only sort of hear a soft “puff” sound when the needle pierced my eardrum painlessly. My partner, however, said it looked like the entire syringe was disappearing into the side of my head. :eek: I do believe it was much more traumatic for her as a witness than me as the patient.
Ouch! Whatever they did to me was during anesthesia so I felt nothing. Even after I woke up the only that was sore for some reason was my throat…
I had a parotidectomy too. Had a little ball of a (benign) tumor that sat right in front and below my left ear flap (is that the tragus?). Like pohjonen says, they cut behind the ear lobe and then down the jaw line (in my case it just went just a wee bit past the corner of the jaw). Then they flip your face open and look for the tumor. I was really lucky in that my doctor said that he wished his golf balls would land in the fairway like my tumor was. It was right on top of the gland and he didn’t have to worry too much about the nerves. My thought was…worry about those nerves! Facial paralysis is not something I enjoyed contemplating. Only lasting effect is that I don’t have any feeling in my left earlobe.
The other weird one was Botox in my butthole. Yep, my anus has no wrinkles but my face does. This is treatment for an anal fissure. It didn’t work. This was followed by a lateral internal sphinterotomy for an anal fissure. Yep, that’s right, they go in and cut the sphincter muscle to relieve the pressure so that the fissure can heal. But my fissure was advanced so he had to “unroof” it as well to allow for proper healing. Sitting becomes an exercise in agony. What’s worse is that two years later, it looks like I have another fissure. So Botox again is likely the treatment. And if that doesn’t work, more cutting. :eek: I wish I liked foods with lots of fiber.
Hey! I had that done too! Didn’t help me, either.
:o
I mean–not that I still wet the bed. But there was no obvious correlation in time between the operation … Well, anyway, this whole line of discussion is why I wasn’t going to post this at all, until I saw jackdavinci step up to the plate first.
I was never very clear on how this was supposed to help, honestly. I do remember being young enough to be worried after the operation that the catheter was a permanent installation & intended to be part of the solution. I guess it’s pretty hard to explain to a young boy why someone’s cutting up his penis, which is presumably why circumsions are traditionally done when they are.
I got my heart rebooted. I have ventricular fibrillation, which cause an irregular heartbeat, with the danger of blood pooling and causing a stroke. You get put under, and they zap your heart. But it didn’t work. The cardiologist put me on a nasty drug and scheduled another one. Between Monday, when a test showed I still had it, and Thursday it went away. I was on the table, they hooked me up to the monitor, and then he said, never mind, you can go.
They told us our daughter’s teeth were going to be a problem ten minutes after she was born. By the time the permanent teeth were coming in some were coming in sideways. It all got fixed with a marathon operating session, after which the oral surgeon canceled all appointments and took his whole office out to lunch to celebrate.
And my wife has a plastic ring that keeps her retina attached to the back of her eye. I’m glad we have good insurance.
I believe you are very, very close. It is EMLA cream. Wonderful stuff.