In hospital advice please?

[paigeharger16]

Hello all i have been in hospital for 3 days now and today after getting xrays and scans they are going to do a ct scanbut as we all know it doesn't show up on scans, by what first doctor was saying they think it may have gone to my bowel, anyone help me on what to say to doctors to get the ball rolling or something? This pain is unbearable

[Impatient]

Scans will show if the bowel is obstructed by endo as it pushes the whole bowel askew. It wont say that it's endo but any organs pushed out of place or stuck in the wrong place with adhesions indicates endo is a possibility. It won't show the extent of endo esewhere either.

gynsurgery.org/ols/uploads/...

illustrates a partially obstructed bowel - so it would be pretty obvious from a scan.

Scans do not show up endo lesions - they are surface dewellers on other tissue and organs and are too shallow to show up, but deep infiltrating endo - as you can see in that pic are certainly capable of being seen. So too endometriomas (blood filled cysts) and ovaries stuck down behind the uterus with adhesions and that sort of thing.

I would wait to see what the CT scan shows. If that doesn't pick up anything obvious then you need to press for an exploratory lap op to see what really is going on inside.

There are plenty of things which need to be checked for and ruled out along the way to an endo dagnosis, and each time something is ruled out - it adds weight to endo or adeno being the root cause of pain.

A CT scan may also spot signs of adeno which can be very useful - but that doesn't rule out there being endo too. It is possibe to have one or the other or both going on at the same time.

Surgery is not likely to spot adeno - but an MRI or CT scan certainly could.

Please try and be patient - it's horrid being in pain, it's horrid being stuck in hosp too, but the journey to and endo diagnosis is rarely ever a straight forward process for any of us.

If your pain is too much and you are in hosp -you must ask for suitable strength pain relief and keep it topped up.

Even when I have been in hosp with kidney stones (which is a darn site more painful than endo - and even slightly worse than a burst ovarian cyst) on number of occasions they are reluctant to precribe strong pain relief until they know what they are hunting for, but you really should insist they do something about the pain levels while they go hunting for the cause of the pain.