Emergency Bowel Surgery 

Sometimes patients come in as an emergency with a problem with their bowel and require urgent surgery. In some situations, the diseased bit of bowel has to be removed with an operation and we're unable to join it back up straight away due to significant infection within the abdomen. If we do join it up then there would be a high risk that join may fail and therefore further faeces may leak inside. In those situations the large intestinal colon is brought out to the skin as an end stoma or end colostomy. Those stomas are reversible in the future. Sometimes patients, because they've undergone major surgery may elect not to have it reversed as often patients will in the right situation ask for it to be reversed. Because of the extent of the surgery needed in these emergency situations immediate reversal is not possible and often we wait 6-12 months before we reverse it. Emergency surgery often requires big cuts in the tummy and to reverse these sort of stomas we will need to go through those big cuts in the tummy to join the bowel back together again in a safe way. Very occasionally it it may be possible to do a keyhole surgery but given the extent of the surgery it's not common that we can do it that way. As such the reversal is a major operation but often the patients are well at that stage, they haven't presented as emergency, much more able to tolerate the operation. There are however complications associated with reversing the stoma but that will be discussed between you and your surgeon and you will need to weigh up the risks of the surgery against the potential benefits of reversing the stoma and that is very much an individual decision.