Support Matt's Journey to Recovery

Update from todays procedure 1/30/25:

Not good news today. Unfortunately, the procedure outcome was unsuccessful. The colonic anastomosis (where the first hospital put my colon back together after removing my sigmoid colon because of diverticulitis) has scarred closed. This was found because the contrast did not go any further than the anastomosis. This is going to delay things and also cause me two more surgeries. The surgeon that saved my life is referring me to his partner who is a colorectal specialist, Dr. King with UW Health. It sounds like we will have to wait 6 months from my emergency surgery which was December 3rd for another surgery. So basically May/June timeframe. The first surgery will be to go in and completely rebuild the anastomosis that the first hospital did and the second surgery, probably a couple months or so after that to complete my ileostomy reversal if everything goes ok so I hopefully don’t have to live with an ostomy bag the rest of my life. This isn’t set in stone yet but I will be meeting with Dr. King hopefully sometime within the next month or two to start planning for everything. I guess it’s going to be a long exhausting year for me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful to be alive but it is definitely hard to cope with right now. Thank you for all your prayers and support!

First, we would like to start off by saying that asking for help is not always easy, but sometimes we have to set our pride aside because help becomes necessary. Matt had surgery for the first time on 11/13/24 for a Sigmoid Colon Resection because of struggles with diverticulitis. The estimated hospital time was 3-5 days and things started off on the wrong foot the second he woke up from surgery. They encountered a few unforeseen challenges during surgery that resulted in them having to approach the procedure differently. He woke up in a tremendous amount of pain, which they continued to struggle controlling the whole time he was in the hospital. Due to having bowel surgery, they placed an epidural to help control pain because narcotics can slow bowel movement down even further which would cause problems with his recovery. Even after having the first epidural adjusted, removed and replaced, he still was not getting any relief from it and it forced them to have to treat his pain with narcotics. The rest of his hospital stay continued to be a struggle between pain management, post surgical complications, and poor hospital care. He developed an ileus (a portion of the bowel that was basically paralyzed) which caused bile to back up into his upper GI tract. A few days after surgery he began vomiting up 100’s of milliliters of bile. Unfortunately, the hospital staff was not proactive to treat this and waited a couple days before placing a NG tube to suction out the bile. This left Matt very uncomfortable dealing with the side effects of that bile sitting in his system. He also went the 11 days of being hospitalized barely consuming any food so he lost a tremendous amount of weight in a very short amount of time, leaving him very weak and run down. Finally, Matt was discharged on 11/24/24 and we were excited for him to come home and really begin to focus on recovery. He continued to struggle with pain and discomfort, even with the pain medication they ordered for home. He reached out to his surgeon on 12/02/24 and was told to stop taking his pain medications because it could be slowing down his recovery and that his labs had looked ok when he left the hospital. It is easy to say that this was negligent of his surgeon. We decided to give it 24 hours to see how he responded to stopping his pain medication and if he didn’t improve we would go to the Reedsburg ER. After our experiences with the original hospital and surgeon, we did not want to continue care there. That night Matt vomited up the sandwich I made him for dinner. The following day he went into the ER where they discovered a bowel perforation (a hole in his intestine) above the surgical site that was leaking bowel matter into his abdomen. Matt was rushed by ambulance to Meriter Hospital in Madison, WI for what the surgeon called “a life saving emergent surgery.” The surgeon first entered laparoscopically with the hopes of not having to reopen his original surgical site, but was unable to fix things due to all the inflammation and damage in Matt’s abdomen. The surgeon was also unable to reach the perforation because of all the inflammation and damage, so he had to place an ileostomy to divert anything that entered his GI tract away from the perforation with the hope that it would be able to heal itself. They closed him back up and placed a wound vac over the incision. Matt spent 8 days at Meriter where he received excellent care. They wasted no time at any point and were very proactive in his treatment. While he was there he had an NG tube placed to keep his GI tract from backing up; a PICC line so they could administer TPN which is a mixture of nutrients; along with many other forms of treatment to keep his pain and infection under control. A few days before leaving the hospital they found an abscess that they placed a drain tube into that he would wear home. We recently had an appointment for the abscess and it is still causing concerns so they removed the tube he originally had and replaced it with a straight drain with a larger drainage bag. Matt still has a very long road of recovery ahead of him that will include many more doctor visits and medical equipment to maintain his new ileostomy. The good news in regards to the ileostomy is that it is not permanent, but it will require another surgery to correct sometime in 2025. Matt has begun physical therapy after losing about 45 lbs and all his strength. We are optimistic for the future, but still in the muck of everyday.