Hi @AniseedBall they changed my appointment at the last minute so I ended up seeing another consultant today. My first reaction was 🙁 especially as on my notes he said it seemed to show that the two small ones weren’t banded after all and I just had the large one removed but he couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t a mistake. I certainly felt as if something had been banded, and the sensation did stop after around a week, but I guess the pain was so bad in that first week who knows what the heck I was feeling.
He was quite reassuring when I listed my concerns before the examination: Discharge, leakage, not quite healed yet and swelling. He said that all those concerns were not unusual at this stage and that he warns all his patients beforehand that this is all to be expected and that our bottoms are not going to behave like our bottoms for a while post op. In fact he went on to say that this is why he doesn’t see his patients at six weeks - he prefers to see them at around three months post op. This is because if there are still issues at this later point then they are less likely to resolve themselves. He did stress that there are things they can do re leakage if this is still ongoing but at this point he wasn’t concerned. I was really detailed in my description of the small amount of leakage which I have in the first couple of hours after a BM and he said what I was describing was what a lot of people at this stage still have.
He asked me about my two births and he said this always weakens your pelvic floor and has an impact on the recovery time after this op. He also seemed to think that my vaginal repair could have an effect on recovery too. I asked about doing pelvic floor exercises as I was worried that this would aggravate the wound but he thought that they would help. I think the fact that I’ve been a lot less active since the op won’t have helped my pelvic floor so I’m going to try to fix that in the coming weeks.
On examination he commented that there was some healing still to be done but it was too uncomfortable around the entrance for me to have a probe so he was unable to look further up. He didn’t seem to think that there was much swelling at all so perhaps I have to lower my expectations of the final cosmetic result.
I mentioned the mucous, although to be honest that has almost stopped, and he said if that was still an ongoing problem they would have do a colonoscopy to see what was the cause.
So although I’m a bit miffed that they messed up by not giving me an appointment and then I booked one for six weeks, which turns out to be too early and not being 100% sure about what was done, I do feel reassured. I am really sore though even from the brief examination so I might have gone back a few steps as I’m sure the wound has been reopened a bit more today.
Hopefully this will reassure you too as we’ve both had vaginal repairs and are having some similar symptoms.
Glad to hear you are down to 2 BMs a day - I hope it continues. The consultant also said to continue with the Movicol as that wasn’t the cause of the leakage.