Under The Knife

There are unlikely to be any posts for the next ten days. Very unlikely indeed, unless the NHS have installed WiFi networks in their hospitals since my last sojourn on the wards. I will, however, be keeping a diary while recovering from the surgery, and some of those fevered pen & ink scribbles will function as notes for a long post here to be typed up slowly but surely on my return.

See you soon…

[later…]

Tomorrow morning at 09.30 GMT I’m going into hospital. Sometime on Thursday, a surgeon will cut a hole in my side and insert a tiny camera, and some tiny surgical instruments. Then two things will happen, as I understand it.

1. Firstly, the surgeon will tour my chest cavity looking for Apical Blebs, the tiny bubbles of flesh that form on the surface of my lungs and stick to the interior of my pleura, then burst, causing the spontaneous pneumothoraxes that have inconvenienced me over the last four years. If the surgeon finds any blebs, they will be burst and sewn up.
2. Then comes the pleurodesis. This involves spraying the upper third of my lungs with talc (yes, talc.) The talc will irritate the pleura. The pleura is a two part structure, with one part lining the inside of the chest, and the other covering the lungs. Being irritated, these two structures will bind to one another.

In short, they plan to make my insides bleed so that they will stick together. Or, more accurately, scab together.

As stated above, I’ll be keeping a diary and, if at all possible, updating this page live. I’ll certainly be taking as many gory photographs as possible, and attempting to secure a video of the whole procedure.

Posted at 3pm on 20/08/02 by Jack Mottram to the misc. category.
Permalink · Add to del.icio.us