![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsBeing in the hospital, you start to realize just how much even high-end of medicine is a kind of voodoo. The surgeons and other doctors rely mostly on their own experiences, trying to find similarities between your case and things they’ve seen before.
Unfortunately my case is unlike any they’ve ever seen before, so the only thing they can do is really guess. I’m sure the gastro-intestinal people have seen a lot of collapsed duodenums and collapsed intestines over the years, but this particular reason, this particular set of circumstances that caused the collapse, they have not seen. Hematomas are not common in the location where mine occurred. The question is still: will it resolve? And when it resolves, when it dissolves enough that it’s no longer putting pressure on the intestine, will the intestine have been damaged to an extent that the bypass is still necessary?
These people have no answers. They just don’t know, not in my case. So they’re guessing and they’re guessing as conservatively as possible. They don’t want to go in and cut while there’s still information that would just make it worse, and they don’t want to go in and cut because in their experience the fluid buildup in the abdomen resolves itself if the body is well cared-for.
I feel like I’m being well cared for here, or at least I’m being medically cared for, which I guess is sort of a different thing.
Unfortunately my case is unlike any they’ve ever seen before, so the only thing they can do is really guess. I’m sure the gastro-intestinal people have seen a lot of collapsed duodenums and collapsed intestines over the years, but this particular reason, this particular set of circumstances that caused the collapse, they have not seen. Hematomas are not common in the location where mine occurred. The question is still: will it resolve? And when it resolves, when it dissolves enough that it’s no longer putting pressure on the intestine, will the intestine have been damaged to an extent that the bypass is still necessary?
These people have no answers. They just don’t know, not in my case. So they’re guessing and they’re guessing as conservatively as possible. They don’t want to go in and cut while there’s still information that would just make it worse, and they don’t want to go in and cut because in their experience the fluid buildup in the abdomen resolves itself if the body is well cared-for.
I feel like I’m being well cared for here, or at least I’m being medically cared for, which I guess is sort of a different thing.
