Know your body

Hemorrhoids Are Collagen Failure?

I paid a colorectal surgeon £6,400 to make my haemorrhoids worse. I am 61. I went in with one. I came out with four, and now the whole thing is swollen every hour of every day instead of for two hours after a bowel movement. I ran a parts counter at a truck dealership in Peoria for twenty-nine years. I am not a complainer and I am not the kind of man who writes anything down. I am writing this because nobody told me the one thing I needed to know, and I would like somebody else to hear it before they sign. I had one. Grade three, up near the front, out for eleven years. It went back in on its own until about 2021 and then it stopped going back in. The consultation took nineteen minutes. He looked, he sat back down, and he said the sentence I had been waiting eleven years for somebody to say. "We can take that out." I asked him if it would come back. He said there was always a chance, and that I would have some evidence of the surgery. I pictured a small scar. A ridge maybe, where the thing used to be. That is what evidence of the surgery means to a man sitting in a chair with his trousers on. Here is what I looked like the week before. Grade: three Duration: eleven years Number of them: one Tubes bought in the previous twelve months: nineteen Swollen: for about two hours after a bowel movement, then it settled Family events attended standing: all of them since 2021 That last line is the one my wife would want me to explain. I have not sat down at a table with my grandchildren since 2021. I stand at the end of it with a plate in my hand and I tell them my back is bad. Here is what it cost. The procedure, out of pocket after insurance: £6,400 Anaesthesia, billed separately three weeks later: £1,150 Three weeks of no work One month of a routine I will not describe to you in detail, except to say that day nine is the worst day of a man's life and nobody warns him about day nine And here is what I look like now, four months later. Number of them: four Swollen: continuously, twenty-four hours a day Surface area: larger than before, which means I do not get clean anymore, which is its own quiet horror at sixty-one Family events attended standing: all of them I went back at one month and I told him. And I watched a professional man work quite hard, for about six minutes, at not calling this a failure. He used the word expected. He said the tissue was still settling. Then he told me he would not take the new ones off because of the risk of narrowing the canal, which is a real risk, and which is also the end of the conversation. I would have taken square one. I would have signed for square one that morning with a smile on my face. Instead I paid seven and a half thousand pounds to be worse than I have ever been, and the man who did it will not say the word out loud. In June my wife dragged me to her cousin's retirement party and I stood, the way I stand at everything. And a man I have played cards with for six years, Wendell, sat in a plastic folding chair for four hours and did not get up once. He is 64. He had the same thing I have. I know he did, because we compared notes in a car park in 2019 like two men who did not want to be having that conversation. By the coolers I asked him what he had done. I assumed he was going to say surgery, and I was going to have to decide whether to tell him. "It is not a procedure," he said. "A fella at my shop explained it to me. That thing is not a vein problem. It is a pad of collagen at the end of the canal that everybody is born with, and after forty you make about one percent less collagen every year. The bleeding is not the disease. The bleeding is what shows up once the padding is gone." And then I understood what I had actually paid for. The surgeon cut off the bulge. The bulge is not the problem. The bulge is what a collapsed pad looks like from the outside. He removed the evidence and left the cause exactly where it was, in a man of sixty-one who is still making one percent less collagen every year, and now there is less material down there than there was before he started. That is why there are four of them now. The pad kept going. It always was going to keep going. Nothing in that operating room was aimed at it. Wendell told me two more things before we went back in. That most cacao has been alkalised since 1828, which strips out the compound entirely, and that if I went to a supermarket and bought a tin I would waste four months finding that out. Turn it over. Look for processed with alkali. And that it runs a hundred and fifty days and then you stop. £99.90 for the five bottles. I did the arithmetic in the car. I had already spent seventy-five times that to be worse. Week 1 to 4: Nothing, and I had been told to expect nothing. Around week three I noticed I had stopped bracing on the arm of the chair before I sat down. Week 5 to 8: The swelling stopped being constant. It came back after a bowel movement and then it went away again, which it had not done since the operation. I sat in the truck for the drive to Springfield without shifting my weight the whole way. Week 9 to 12: Two of the four flattened out. I want to be careful here. They did not vanish. They went quiet and they went small, and one morning I could not find the smallest one at all. Week 13 to 16: I sat down at my own kitchen table for Sunday dinner with three grandchildren and I stayed there through the pudding. My wife did not say anything about it for two weeks and then she said, "You have been sitting down." Week 17 to 20: Drove to my daughter's in Rockford in one go. Two and a half hours. First time since 2019. Day 150: Fifth bottle in the recycling. No sixth one. That is the part that still gets me. You take it for a hundred and fifty days and then you stop, because the pad is not being propped up by a daily dose, it has been rebuilt. There is no bottle six. There is no subscription. There is no man in a nineteen-minute consultation telling you there is always a chance. Here is what I learned at sixty-one, and it cost me seven and a half thousand pounds to learn it. Everything I have ever been sold was aimed at what you can see. The cream numbs what you can see. The banding ties off what you can see. The surgery cuts off what you can see. Not one of them was ever aimed at the pad underneath, which is the only thing that was actually changing. The surgery did not fail because the surgeon was bad at it. He was probably very good at it. It failed because it was the wrong target, and there is no operation for what was actually wrong with me. If you have a date on a calendar and a leaflet in a drawer you have never opened, read this part twice. You cannot undo an excision. I have been trying to for four months. A hundred and fifty days, then you stop. The five-bottle course is £99.90, UK delivery is free, and it comes with a twelve-month guarantee that only pays out if you quit taking it. Finish the hundred and fifty days, stop, and if it comes back inside twelve months you get every pound back. No conditions. No restocking fee. No questions. £99.90 once, or nineteen minutes in a chair with a man who will not use the word failure. https://venalys-lab.com/products/venalys-collagen-cushion-support-capsules