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Recovery from a unilateral oophorectomy

Women's Health | Last Active: Dec 24, 2023 | Replies (11)

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@konniehoover

@smiles444

Your pain may be a remnant of having your ovary removed. That would make sense since you just had surgery there. When i had my ovary out i had some pain for a few days and then I felt better. I didn't have the complication of a part of my bowel being stuck to the abdominal wall but I had a large chocolate cyst on my ovary and many adhesions caused by endometriosis. The doctor released the worst of these.

I know it's tempting to assume it was the surgery but coincidences do happen so I have to ask if you've had your appendix out yet. My appendix was actually an unusual presentation, as many of my complaints are. I had pain on the lower right side on and off for years. It was never severe, double over, vomiting and diarrhea like my son had kind of pain, when he had appendicitis. The night before I was supposed to have laparoscopic Nissan fundoplication surgery I started having lower right side pain that was pretty bad. I also, at the same time, was doubled over with upper left side pain.

Sounds kinda weird, right? Well not wanting to take any chances, with surgery coming up in the morning, I decided to go to the closest emergency room. It hurt! When i got there and explained the situation they called my surgeon and he asked that they transfer me to the hospital I was to have surgery at. They did an ultrasound and discovered i had "sludge" in my gallbladder but that pain resolved all of a sudden, as happens with gallbladder disease sometimes, as we were doing the ultrasound and by the time my doctor got there and ordered some lab tests my liver panel was only mildly elevated so we decided to look into it further in a nonemergency situation. My gallbladder could wait. They also checked my appendix. My white count was up, I had a fever, the ultrasound was inconclusive and my x-rays showed a huge impaction in the ascending colon. I was pretty constipated.

Under the circumstances, they decided to admit me, deal with the inpaction and constipation and reassess me in the morning for surgery. By morning, after a long night of Go-lytly and trips to the bathroom, the pain was worse, my fever was higher and we decided against the Nissan for now. In the meantime he told me that he wasn't convinced I had appendicitis. We tossed around exploratory surgery and he told me that 85% of the time exploratory surgery for pain yielded no answers. In spite of that we decided to do the exploratory surgery, I think to humor the patient who "knew something was wrong!"

To make a long story short I woke up 7 hours later to a room full of doctors. My doctor began: "your surgery took a little longer than we thought". He explained that he could usually remove an infected appendix, which mine was, in about 45 minutes laparoscopically, my surgery had taken 5 hours and several interns had been called in to observe. It seems he had many layers of adhesions to to go thru trying and failing to find my ovary, which had been removed but he didn't know that, and looking for my appendix. When he finally got to it, it was very long, inflamed and wound around my colon, right where the impaction had been. It appeared the appendix had caused some ischemia of the colon interfering with motility and causing the impaction. He said that in 20 years as a surgeon he had never seen evidence of chronic appendicitis, until my surgery. He didn't think it was a real diagnosis until now. We agreed that because I didn't appears not to have had acute symptoms until the night before, we missed it and it got better on it's own.

Now, this probably isn't what's wrong with you. I hate telling scare stories based on my crazy experiences. Hopefully you're just taking a bit longer to heal but it's worth checking out if you still have an appendix.

Hope you feel better soon.

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Replies to "@smiles444 Your pain may be a remnant of having your ovary removed. That would make sense..."

Hi,
I still have my appendix. That is interesting, I will have to bring this up to my doctor.