Pancreatitis

[Karen40]

My 14 y.o. daughter is 18 months post op - fused T4 to L3 - two stage surgery due to some complications in the 1st one.

Last Friday, she woke up with a very sore stomach that got progressively worse. I took her to emerg. and after several blood tests, it was determined that she had pancreatitis. She was hospitalized for 5 days because she got very sick (bowel shut down, they needed to put a tube through her nose down to her intestine to drain it, she couldn't eat, etc.) but since she's been discharged, it's as if nothing happened. She bounced back so fast.

They are not sure what the cause of the pancreatitits was - they suspect it was a virus and samples have been sent off to a lab in Vancouver and we won't know for sure for 6 weeks.

Pancreatitis is very uncommon in children.

I was googling some info and found a site suggesting that there may be a link to scoliosis surgery. http://journals.mui.ac.ir/jims/article/viewArticle/2048

Just curious if anybody else had Pancreatitis after their surgeries. The pediatrician says that it is unrelated but I am not yet convinced..

Karen

[Sherie]

Hi Karen

How scary! I'm so glad to hear that everything turned out ok. You just don't expect something like this so long after surgery.

That was a very interesting article. The first thing that came to my mind was if these were anterior or posterior surgeries. Did your daughter end up having an anterior procedure?

[Sherie]

I got the answer. My husband is Persian and was able to read the full study. He had some trouble translating some of the medical terms.

The study results showed that it wasn't related to anterior vs. posterior (47% anterior and 58% posterior developed pancreatitis) but those with blood loss between 400-800ml developed it. Those patients with blood loss between 300-400ml did not get pancreatitis. There was more data but it was a bit confusing in translation.

For reference, one unit of donated blood is approx. 450ml of which they can make 220ml of packed red blood cells.

[Karen40]

That is interesting... My daughter did lose blood and required 2 units to be transfused...

I will ask the surgeon when we are there for our 2 year follow up in December.

Karen

[debbei]

It seems odd though that she would develop it due to surgery 18 months post op. Who knows, anything is possible. I'm glad your daughter recovered and I hope it doesn't return.