Pete’s Musings

I meant to post this a month ago … but the images just sat on my desktop. Well time for a cleanup! OK. so I had a transjugular liver biopsy and they took the sample in an unfortunate area which basically short-circuited the circulation in my liver … connecting the input directly to the output. This resulted in sporadic and sometimes massive blood loss. It’s a very rare complication, but obviously it does happen. Most doctors don’t even consider it a possibility because it’s so rare, and are convinced that the bleeding must be from elsewhere (despite the patients insistence!). Many Many endoscopies are required to convince them that the bleed is not in the stomach, intestine, or colon where it is more commonly (i.e. varacies). The bleeding actually occurs in the liver and drains into the colon through the common bile duct, as depicted in the above diagram. Read More »

Just thought I would post to let everyone know that things went well with the surgery to plug the hole (fistula) in my liver. I had the operation last Monday (March 31st) in the afternoon and was sent home via adapted transport early evening on Wednesday. When they told me they were sending me home so soon I was kinda freaked out because I was having constant liver pain, still had residual bloody stools, and was experiencing fatigue and exhaustion 10-20 times sooner than before (and that was already way too soon for comfort). But a little reassurance from my doctor that the bleed shouldn’t reoccur and I was ready to come home … just being in the hospital was driving me crazy. All those sick and annoying people screaming all day long. lol.

Anyway here’s what happened … Read More »

I was in the midst of writing a huge and awesome blog post about my surgery … when I accidentally hit the backspace key outside of a text box! In firefox, that means that the page goes back to previous in history and I LOST THE POST. I was devastated. Not only was it thorough and well written, it was funny. I wanted to cry. Anyway, I guess I’ll get back to it soon, but in the meantime I decided to make a few changes here.

1) I added a message me box to the right. If you write me a message there it goes directly to my new Instant Messaging software. If you stick around, Read More »

So i hauled myself into Montreal Thursday morning to see my regular liver specialist at the Royal Victoria Hospital. I like my doctor. When I get to see him 1:1, we work together to figure shit out. And he seems to have a good sense of when to ‘wait and see’ and when to take immediate action. This was one of those immediate action things. lol

So I had this camera capsule endoscopy thing last week. Looks throughout the intestines where the gastro- and colono-scopies can’t reach. It didn’t show anything unusual. I had more bleeding on Wednesday and an ‘episode’ on Tuesday … so something definitely up. Doctor could see that the drive in to see him had already taken a lot out of me, so he pulled a few strings and called in a favour to get me admitted to the short term stay unit so i could take some immediate tests. I love my Doctor. A trip to the ER would have done me in. Had a CT scan (yay, my weight is now safely under their arbitrary cutoff point), and also repeated the colonoscopy. Colonoscopy was clear (and quite uncomfortable I must say!). But FINALLY, they found the problem in the CT and it was just like my doctor had suspected after reviewing everything during my appointment.

Surprise surprise … a rare complication of my transjugular liver biopsy Read More »