Perianal Abscess

I thought I had a boil on my bum, so I went to the doctor. He recognised the problem straight away and sent me packing off to hospital. it was a perianal abscess and needed surgery !!!

Anthony dropped me off at Pilgrim http://www.zyra.org.uk/pilghosp.htm at about 9:45am...I had to put £5 of petrol in Robert's car so that we could get there....what a surprise ;)

I went up to the Surgical Assessment Unit, 9th Floor and waited in the day room for about an hour for the bed to be made ready.

The doctor came to see me, a very young 'studenty' bloke. I don't think he enjoyed looking at my smelly, pus oozing bum....the abscess had burst by now !

Then an anaesthetist came in, asked some Q's, told me that surgery started at 2pm, there were 2 patients ahead of me and that I would be seen at about 5pm.

I had already invested £3.50 in the PatientLine card http://www.patientlinesystems.com/uk/en/home.aspx, enabling 24 hours of TV viewing on my bedside unit, so I watched a bit of Big Brother on E4 and dozed.

At about 6pm the surgeons came and told me that they had run very late and that I had a choice.

• Stay overnight to have the Operation in the morning, but no food, NIL by mouth..General Anaesthetic.
• Have a local anaesthetic, get it done immediately with a bit of pain, food & go home.

I went for the pain, food & home option.

So, they injected me with something, I haven't got aclue what is was, I believe it was supposed to anaesthetize...it didn't. They then got a scalpel and made a few cuts. The pain was quite bad, especially when he cut out what he described was dried skin !

Anyway, it was all done, they put some Sorbosan (seaweed) dressing http://www.dressings.org/Dressings/sorbsan.html in the hole and I could now go home...when the nurses had done all the paperwork.

I had missed the last bus home 7:20pm, so had to ring Mum who I managed to persuade to collect me.

I now have a district nurse come round every day to change the dressing. This is very important as the wound must heal from the inside out and not scab over.

No that I have started a 'medical' page I may as well tell you about other things that have happened to me.

The most common problem that I have is due to Delayed Pressure Urticaria http://www.emedicine.com/derm/topic447.htm

They do not know what causes this or what can cure it, so I'll have to live with the problem.Lmao !

And we cannot forget my knee.

In May 1981 I had a motorcycle crash in Cyprus and was quite badly damaged. I broke my left knee joint and suffered a Brachial Plexus injury.

I complained about my knee to doctors for years, they kept on telling me that I was bound to have problems, because I had broken it. I even had keyhole surgery on the NHS to look at what the problem was - they couldn't see anything...perhaps they had left the lens cap on the laparoscope !

Eventually in 2000 CPW's doctor in Wimpole Street sent me to see John Browett, who rebuilt Paul Gascoigne's knee, in Harley Street. I went for an X-Ray first, walked in to see John, he looked at the X-Ray, came over to the bed, felt my knee and straight away said "Alex, this is still broken".

"Blimey" said I, "You mean I have been walking around witha broken knee joint for 19 years".

"Indeedy you have mate" , he replied, "and it's called a non union of the medial tibial plateau."

He then booked me in for a keyhole session and sent me for a CT scan and loads of Xrays.

2 weeks later I was in The Princess Grace Hospital, ready for the early morning operation.

It took about 7 hours, but it was all done...and now I had 3 months of recovery & Physio to go through. They had to take some bone off my hip to put in the knee. Hammer & Chisel were used...see photo.

There is a nice metal plate in there now along with 6 screws and a drill bit....it was supposed to be 7 screws, but the drill bit snapped while drilling out the hole and they couldnt get it out...so they left it as it was...lmao.