Surgeon Consult - #1

Prior to today's consultation, my wife and I made a checklist of items we wanted to ask the surgeons. I'll be honest: I tried to find questions that were straight up direct. If you don't have a problem answering the hard questions, then you get to cut me up. Ideally, we were trying to find a surgeon that did the surgery at least partially laparoscopically, as I wasn't looking to have a zipper up my front side like the old-school surgeries (or emergency surgeries). I'm not so concerned about the scars (they always have interesting stories), but the recovery is supposedly less.

We met our first surgeon, fairly young, but quite congenial and seemed to have a good bedside manor. We liked the facilities, but was concerned that the surgeon did a hand-assisted pouch stitching. Not that it's inferior (some people think it's the best), but again, I didn't want a large zipper opening. He hadn't done many of these procedures, but it was his specialty, so that was comforting.

Based on my results, age, length of disease, etc., he felt that the jpouch was the best solution and I would be a good candidate based on my health and sphincter control. [I never thought I would ever be proud of "sphincter control", but I'll add that list of my "things I got going for me."] His nurse practitioner was wonderful to deal with and was a real joy to work with.

My wife and I left the office and traveled back home, thinking, okay, he seemed to be okay, but we couldn't sell ourselves on it. We had two others so we left our options open until we conducted the other consultations.