"...a slippery slope to agony and eventually death..."
So many people have come here and said some variation of, "I'm in terrible pain. I've got to do SOMETHING. My surgery is scheduled for..."
The single most important thing that I have learned from the IAS and the wonderful people who post here is that you can't just "DO SOMETHING." Because having surgery that will cause all of your symptoms to be WORSE is, technically speaking, "SOMETHING" !!! The quilt is full of the stories of desperate people who were "willing to do anything" and what they did was MAKE THINGS WORSE!!!
Please, please, don't just assume that because the adhesions are a "serious problem" and the surgery is "serious surgery" that the surgery will make the adhesions better!
The bottom line numbers are that approximately 1/3 of the US population has adhesions. (That's 90,000,000 people. A HUMONGOUS number of people!) 90%-95% of those people will never have the slightest problem with their adhesions. Of the 5-10 million people who will have problems with them sometime in their lives, the VAST MAJORITY of those people will have a bowel obstruction, surgery to cut the adhesions causing the obstruction, and never have another problem for the rest of their lives. 99.99% of the people with adhesions are NOT in any pain and will never be in any pain from them except those who get an obstruction will be in pain during a couple of days of the episode of a complete bowel obstruction.
People who are in serious disabling pain for adhesions are quite rare. Given the odds, depending upon the average age of your doctor's patients, somewhere between 25% and 50% of your doctor's patients have adhesions. If YOU have serious disabling pain from your adhesions, then YOU are quite possibly the only adhesion-SUFFERER of all of your doctor's patients. Having ARD (adhesion-related disease) is different from "having adhesions." Merely "having adhesions" is as common as dirt and basically harmless. Having ARD is a vicious, horrific and RARE condition.
If you have ARD, make sure that your doctor is treating you as a person with ARD. Because if your doctor is treating you as a person who merely "has adhesions" then your doctor is more than likely pushing you over the top of "a slippery slope to agony and eventually death."
-- cathy :-)