seanymc

I can give you some first hand experience. My 19 year old son went in probably four or five days after a perf/rupture due to a high pain tolerance. They put him on IV for 4 days. He seemed to be getting some fevers at that time and more pain ) so after doing some Ultra sounds that showed massive inflammation they had to do a CT scan. After that they were able to find a route to do laparascopic surgery. With ultra sound they could not find a way to drain the abcess. Did not want to disturb the mass much All they did was put a drain in, remove some pus and did some minor irrigation. The drain filled up pretty regularly for a few days and I think they pulled it four or five days after it dried up. His WBC was over 20 when he arrived. He was negative for peritonitis or septis because his body fat, tissues and gut walled it off perfectly...as perfect as something like this can be. He was switched off IV after 5 days (drain was done on day six) and put on oral antibiotics fifth day in or so for 3 weeks after that. His WBC was about 13 on day 10 that he had been in ther...they were going to discharge him day 10, but WBC count spiked to 17 likely due lab error, so left in few more days and returned to 13 and he was discharged. After one week at home I took him back to just have WBC count checked ..it was 7. That was a request I made. So basically 3 weeks later (2 after admission and 1 wk of being home) he was feeling much better. Just had another follow up. His laparscopic drain was basically a month ago and it has been five weeks or so since he was first admitted. He is totally back to normal now. If not for a little weight loss you would not even know he was in. He has been eating heavily for weeks. Scars from surgery completely healed, no tenderness or mass on examination. His appendix was obliterated. We are not going back for an Interval appendectomy due to doc recommendation and everything I read online. No point in doing it. So he is done. Sure there is a risk something can happen later, but that exists whether or not we do IA. But since his appendix blew up no point in going in there to poke around and likely remove debris that will be absorbed by his body anyway. Since his body was able to deal with the inital trauma quite well it can certainly handle this. He was lucky. I commend the approach taken. Maybe not all patients could handle it like he did and make no miskate he quite ill, the first six or seven days, but the conservative approach is much less riskier. You will know if it works within 3 weeks, and with how my son is now it worked very well.