So I'm 8 days post op. While I'm not in agony, I'm beyond frustrated with my progress thus far. I would have hoped that I'd be able to point to some silver lining thing at this point where I could say "at least this one aspect is better now", but I honestly can't. Everything is either the same now or worse. Pre surgery I had this problem to a manageable point. I had no pain with bowel movements, very mild tightening and some mild discomfort for 2-3 hours afterwards. I purposely schedule my eating habits to have my bms in the evenings. During the following day I would be mostly fine and experience some manageable discomfort sitting at various times, but again - it was manageable. Now post surgery I'm learning more with each passing day that I have more pain with bowel movements, I have a lot more tightening afterwards and what used to be just mild discomfort is now pain that lasts 6-8 hours. I think what really makes me angry is that my sphincter muscle was supposed to be weaker... Why does it feel tighter now? For this to be the ultimate way for my fissure heal it now actually seems less feasible. It took me 4 months of trying to heal naturally for me to get to the point where bms were half tolerable again. I waited 7 months total before deciding to have the procedure and now I feel like I've gone backwards.

Something I want to say about my AF in general... This is by far the worst thing to ever happen to me. I guess I've been lucky until now as I have never had any sort of ailment that couldn't be repaired with a reasonable line of treatment. It's amazing how it's even possible for something like this to happen at all. It's getting harder and harder now to envision a point where I can look at this as some crummy closed chapter of my life. It's just always something that's gonna have no end in sight.

I hope I don't come off as whinny here as I know I'm still early in the recovery process and I'm sure there are many people on this board that have it worse or harder than me. I guess at a minimum, writing out my thoughts and frustrations here is kind of therapeutic. So for anyone who reads this, thank you for your time and I definitely wish you all luck in your healing!

I know what you mean not being able to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It took me a LONG time to heal, as well as some others on here. I had a complication from the surgery too so I had to have a second, more substantial one and that took another 5 months to heal. I also had muscle tightening down there after LIS and was confused how this could be. There are many muscles down there and in LIS they only cut a small portion of one of them, so it could be something else that has tightened up or the portion of the muscle that was not cut. My external sphincter gives me trouble, still. Perhaps yours is too.

I have to say that it is perfectly normal to feel worse after LIS surgery. If you do not, you are the exception. Things do have to get worse before they get better and everyone gets better at their own speed. How are your other symptoms? Do you have any bleeding with BMs? Seepage? Hang in there. If this surgery didn't work, it's not the end of the line...