How many people on here have some sort of leakage after lis? I mean you have a bm, then some time later you need to go back to the toilet and wipe again.

I'm sort of getting frustrated because the information is so inconsistent. Some studies mention incontinence in 30% of patients, others 10 or 5%. My surgeon tells me he's never seen incontinence in a male and once in a female and that was to gas. This guy has been around for many years - and never seen incontinence in a male.. no i don't believe this for a second.

"When comparing office records and response to the postal survey, significantly more patients had flatal incontinence than that recorded in their medical records" (source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15906136). It seems very obvious to me that surgeons are creating surveys that are designed to under-report the frequency of incontinence. I think plenty of people wouldn't consider having to wipe more than once incontinence.. but I would.

It's not good enough for a surgeon to say that dealing with minor incontinence is acceptable compared to fissure pain when they aren't initially disclosing the risks.

My fissure gives me a small amount of pain and discomfort so I'm trying to decide whether to have surgery and risk leakage/incontinence. But making that decision is quantitatively impossible when surgeons are clearly manipulating us. I think the best thing we can do is look at real studies and make a decision based on that. However, it's rarely very clear if they consider multiple wiping as incontinence.. hence - how many people here have to wipe more than once now that they've had an lis??

I had to wipe quite frequently after my LIS, it lasted about 10 weeks post op then stopped, during this time my fissure has healed though!

Since my LIS, I've had to do some "clean up work" a few hours later. It's not much, though, and I'm not convinced that it's much different than pre-LIS. I just became very "anal" ;) about cleanliness down there after the fissure incident. Hopefully, it's not a bad sign for possible future incontinence.

How long has it been since your surgery?

It was December 2010, so about 6 years.

I want to emphasize that the cleanup is minor. It just seems to be a little "remainder" after a BM that works its way out with me moving around. After the cleanup a few hours later, nothing else comes out until the next BM. I'm still not convinced that this was caused by the LIS, or that it could be considered "incontinence".

Do you feel like you need to wipe though? Like does it cause itchiness or irritation or anything?

I'm 16 weeks post LIS and can honestly say after the first week I had no leakage at all. In the first week I had a very small amount but I think that was more to do with the incision site than my BMs.
If you are in minimal pain then you will probably have a small fissure which in turn will mean a very small cut so even less chance of leakage.
As for myself I was having major spasms and would happily have worn incontinence pants for the rest of my life just to escape the pain...I begged my surgeon to do a larger than normal cut as my resting pressure was 130 but he wouldn't as there is no way a surgeon would do anything that would risk incontinence.
Only you can decide whether it's worth the risk for you.

Yes, sometimes I'll feel an itchiness when it's a little dirty down there.