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.

Once he had gotten as much pus as he could from the now open wound the surgeon sterilized the region and then packed a gauze pad into it. Covering it with a surgical dressing and tape, he explained to my wife that she would have to remove the gauze twice a day, pack new clean gauze in the wound, and then cover it with a fresh dressing. I was given a pair of powerful antibiotic prescriptions, which I would have to take for one week to combat the infection. The pain had still not lessened when I was sent home. I was unable to sleep soundly due to the pain but finally nodded off. When I woke up I was very weak but the intense discomfort had gone, much to my relief.

My wife changed the dressing and packing twice a day, which was just as unsavory a proposition at home as it had been at the ER. But the wound looked better each passing day and the drainage lessened over time. My appetite came back slowly; I had lost a startling amount of weight and muscle mass from the malady, especially in my arms and legs. However, after a week my surgeon decided that the packing of the wound could stop and he closed the opening with sticky Steri-Strips. My wife kept the area clean and changed the strips as needed. The wound, over the course of another week, was almost completely closed. My wife kept it clean with peroxide and a saline solution and covered with a dressing. My strength returned in time along with my appetite. This infection had really knocked the stuffing out of me, more so than any previous illness I had ever gone through. I could only imagine how people coped with the horrible pain and serious consequences of an infection before the advent of the antibiotics which basically had saved my life.