How I Battled a Serious Abdominal Infection

I had just been discharged from the hospital following a colon-resection operation when I developed a serious infection. The site of the infection was the incision in my abdomen through which the colon had been accessed. The infection came on within twenty-four hours of my going home from the hospital and it quickly rendered me immobile. My battle with this infection was as tough as anything I had ever experienced in my lifetime health-wise. Infections can occur no matter how careful the doctors and nursing staff, but what seemed like a minor setback would soon challenge me as no other medical condition ever had.

The infection first manifested itself along the top of the incision. I complained to my wife that the area was tender and soon after I could feel the pain spreading throughout my abdomen. However, there was no telltale redness in the region that made it apparent that an infection was to blame. I soon found that it impossible to walk without being in the most severe pain I had ever known and my wife decided I had to get to the emergency room as fast as we could.

By this time I was not able to even make it the short distance from my chair to the car in the driveway so I called my brother and he came over to help me into the car. My wife got me to the ER in short order where a wheelchair took me to one of the cubicles where I was laid down on a bed with some difficulty. The surgeon who had performed my colon resection came down and knew right away that an infection was the culprit, as now there was much redness in the incision area, branching out east and west across my belly. I was given a powerful and fast-working pain killer before the surgeon opened up the top of the incision. He made approximately a three inch cut, which was about two inches deep, from which he drained almost a full cup of pus. This was accomplished by putting gauze pads into the opening and then removing them, a very painful and unpleasant process indeed.