Hi everyone,

I have LIS scheduled 4/1.

Have a question - I have battled a fissure for nearly a year. Healing - retear after a few months - healing after a week or so . This has gone in for a year.

I’m currently dealing with an open fissure now and knowing my history this thing should heal up within the next few weeks. I’m curious if anyone has had LIS schedule but been semi healed or relatively healed and still had the procedure?

Hi foreverbum1. I’m sorry to hear that you have been dealing with a recurrent fissure. I got my first one 8 years ago and was lucky that it healed with the ointment. My second one happened last year and the creams were unable to fix it. It was a small fissure and I wasn’t in much pain at all and was feeling about 80-90% on most days. But my doctor said it would probably never heal due to the spasm retearing it. So I went in and had the LIS procedure feeling pretty much fine. It was a hard and scary decision at the time and my recovery wasn’t the easiest because I ended up having 3 procedures on my LIS surgery day. At times I regretted moving ahead with the procedure, but I am happy to say that with where I am now - I would do it again. It fixed a chronic tight sphincter problem that I wasn’t even aware that I had and I can have normal BMs again. I thought I had IBS related problems these past 10 years when all along it was actually my body responding to issues with chronic fissure and spasm.

Choosing to have the surgery when you aren’t in misery is a very difficult decision to make. There are risks associated with the surgery so you have to weigh those risks against the benefits it can provide. It is considered one of the gold standard treatments for chronic fissure and it has a very high percentage success rate.

For me - I feel like I have a new body now because it corrected some major issues. But I am also dealing with the side effect of minor leakage (which I believe is a more common side effect from the surgery than is generally reported) and I have had to find ways to manage it. Still - I would do it all over again to be feeling as good as I feel now.

I hope that your fissure fully heals this month... and if it doesn’t and you move ahead with the procedure, be patient with your body as it heals because it can take quite a long time with many ups and downs before you are feeling 100% again. I posted a surgery recovery diary and the people on this support board got me through the worst of it and I am so grateful for that.

Best of luck to you and please keep us posted on your decision and on how you are doing if you have the surgery.