For over 7 months the Ken Butt has been a right pain in the butt. It’s stubbornly not healing and may appear to be getting slightly worse with the wounds tunnelling inside.
New Developments
Until this weekend, the Ken Butt wounds were being dress on a daily basis and the perineum wound in particular had been causing some issues by leaking more exudate than usual. The practice nurses had been treating that wound by simply laying Aquacell on top of it and observing the size of it, which isn’t particularly big.
On the weekend a district nurse that I hadn’t seen for a while decided to probe it and was surprised by it’s depth. This was quite a revelation to me as I was under the impression it was just a shallow wound and nothing more.
Visiting the practice nurse this morning the wound was probed and was tracking approximately 3.5cm in depth, which is not a good sign. The pilonidal sinus was probed and that is tracking in the direction of the perineum would around 4cm. They’re not joined but are probably in close proximity of each other.
Time to Call the Stoma Team
An MRI was performed a week ago but the results aren’t currently back so I’m not sure what’s been discovered, if anything. Based on how I have been feeling, and in the interests of keeping the team updated with how things are going, I decided to make a call to my stoma team. I felt like I need to get a lot of my chest, not just about the wounds but the hernia and how I’ve been feeling. The immediate problem to be solved are the wounds so that was their main concern. The other issues will need to be addressed separately.
The stoma team are great and by the afternoon I had received a call saying that my specialist wanted to see me next week – two weeks ahead of my scheduled appointment. He did say that I may need more ‘EUA” (Examination Under Anaesthetic) to determine what’s going on. Not ideal, but by now I’m used to random bits of surgery.
How Do I Feel?
It’s always good having a clearer picture of what’s going on but on the flip side, knowing that the perineum wound is tracking isn’t something that I wanted. Ideally, but perhaps unrealistically, I wanted both, or at least one wound, to heal without further surgical intervention, but from my limited knowledge it does appear that laying open the wound to allow it to heal may be necessary. Things will hopefully become clearer over the next couple of weeks after seeing the specialist and getting the MRI results but if that’s what’s going to happen, it will be another setback.
