Help me get my wife healthy again

Shelley Taylor is my 37yo wife, she’s a mother, a daughter, a sister.

By April this year, Shelley was scared of her own fertility and Roe being overturned, and took steps to find an OBGYN to do a full hysterectomy. She had good reason to get the surgery—pregnancy was dangerous for Shelley. In April 2015, Shelley suffered an ectopic rupture, almost died from internal bleeding, and lost her left Fallopian tube in the process. She had her only child a year later.

After 4 months of preparing, Shelley was finally scheduled for the full hysterectomy on August 1st this year. She was discharged on August 2nd. The surgery, we thought, was a success, even though she was in pain high in her right flank and had been since the anesthesia wore off, at the time of discharge. She communicated the pain she was in and it was dismissed as normal.

We went home for a couple days and by 2am on the 5th, Shelley had so much right flank pain, there had to be a problem.

I took her to the ER at the hospital where she had the hysterectomy. In half an hour a CT showed that her right kidney and ureter were twice the normal size and it was likely from an internal stitch causing a kink in her ureter near her bladder. Shelley needed emergency surgery to avoid kidney failure and sepsis. A ureteral stent was inserted and she was discharged the next morning with pretty much no follow up care after the emergency surgery.

In the evening of August 12th, I took Shelley, in a lot of flank and pelvic pain again, to a different emergency room than the hospital where she had the previous two procedures.

A CT scan showed that urine leaking from the ureter where the stitch had kinked it had formed an abscess the size of a golfball low in her pelvis. Shelley was put on antibiotics and admitted for a week, before being sent home (08/19) with a midline IV port in her bicep to continue antibiotics at home for a month. Then she was switched to oral antibiotics for a couple weeks.

Shelley had the ureteral stent removed on September 27th and the subsequent CT revealed that her ureter hadn’t healed or had been damaged again when the stent was removed, and worse than that—along the same line the abscess formed, a ureterovaginal fistula (tunnel) formed causing Shelley to experience urinary incontinence from her damaged ureter out a hole at the top of her vagina constantly. The incontinence became full blown constant on September 18th.

My wife has been in diapers for six weeks now, and as of today it has been 3 months since she was discharged from the hysterectomy.

I’ve been working hard at Port Canaveral for 5 years as a longshoreman: unloading cargo ships, loading trucks, and helping keep this country stocked on supplies vital to our survival. I was supposed to be out of work for one week for Shelley’s hysterectomy. Instead, I took over as her primary caregiver for a month, and Shelley’s mom moved in with us to take care of our 6yo for 2 months. I have to drive Shelley to appointments and tests, and so, the paychecks are smaller.

We’ve been trying for a month to find a surgeon that can help her before March 2023. The Mayo Clinic finally came through yesterday, and we will be in Jacksonville tomorrow registering Shelley, scheduling her surgery, and paying the $5K deposit required to even see her, which is why I’m writing this. Mayo Clinic is out of our network.

We need help. I need my wife back.