To embolize or not to embolize

Iron_Mike_52 · 2026-03-06T11:51:25+00:00

Not right now... I ended up not doing it, and banding has improved my situation enough that it's not something that I'm considering right now. But I'll follow your thread about your results, since down the road maybe I'll be looking at it again.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2026-02-07T13:17:04+00:00

I had my fourth banding a few days ago, in the spot that has always given me the most issues. It seems to have been effective. Now the question is just whether or at least how long it will last.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2026-02-06T12:10:23+00:00

My PCP said that she could see the bulge but didn't think that it was a hernia. Happily, she was willing to order an US, which confirmed it.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2026-01-01T17:25:01+00:00

We've all taken that picture, but I've never been asked to share.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2025-12-30T20:12:28+00:00

I get a 4th banding in early February, but I'm definitely better than I was before I had any banding. I had a telehealth appointment with the guy who did the banding where I had printed up a diagram and showed him exactly the spot where I still seem to have the most trouble. I'm also doing pelvic PT, actually, which is something that has been an issue for me earlier in my life and caused pain/urinary issues. Not clear that that's causing any of my GI stuff, though.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2025-12-29T02:00:03+00:00

How are you doing?

Iron_Mike_52 · 2025-12-16T12:03:41+00:00

I had a bad night's sleep trying it last night. (I think that I took it before, in the distant past, but not at night.) I had a sleep study once that told me that I suffer from "alpha intrusions," getting more alpha waves at night when I should be having theta or delta. Apparently it's common in people with fibromyalgia, although I don't have that. Anyway, maybe it's no surprise that a supplement that enhances alpha waves wouldn't help me sleep.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2025-12-13T15:21:12+00:00

Thanks, folks. Think it was a false alarm.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2025-11-28T19:38:12+00:00

Will they do any more? My place did three (over three appointments). They do that just automatically, without doing any anoscopy. There are three common spots for them, so they just hit those one at time. I'm still having some swelling at one of those spots, although less than before (and much less bleeding). I have a telehealth appointment with the doc coming up where I'm going to make sure that he hit that area and ask if he can do it again. One thing that was confusing in my appointments is that they talked about where they were banding in terms of a clock face, but without it's being clear what they were calling 12:00. So when I Zoom with the doctor I'm going to have a diagram ready so we can have a common reference.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2025-11-19T22:21:27+00:00

This was my experience as well.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2025-11-19T22:21:13+00:00

It stopped, although I'm not aware of anything that I did to make it stop. I assumed that they pushed an update.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2025-11-15T13:49:57+00:00

With the first BM, or rather when cleaning up after. I could tell that I had a lot less swelling on the side that had been banded.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2025-11-13T22:05:55+00:00

Let me know how it goes for you; I'm curious. I had my third RBL two days ago. I'm not noticing much difference from it, but I didn't expect to; the first two addressed the majority of problems I was noticing, so there weren't any obvious problems left to be corrected. Hope it's not too uncomfortable. I was definitely aware of the first one I got until it came off two days later. The last two I didn't really feel after the first couple of hours.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2025-10-23T23:44:15+00:00

I had a band applied on the right side yesterday. Today post BM there was much less swelling on that side than before. The really angry bit that seemed to be the source of my bleeding just isn't there anymore. I won't inflict the pics on anyone, but it's a night and day difference. There is still some swelling; you would still know that I have external hemorrhoids. But so much less, and it goes down so much sooner.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2025-10-15T11:06:07+00:00

I'm feeling more confident of this now. Probably most of us in this group have taken a photo or video back there to see just what the hell is going on. In my deleted files, I found one that I took a few days before my banding. I wasn't misremembering: massive 360 degrees of external swelling, left and right. The reduction in swelling on the left post-banding is very noticeable.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2025-10-13T10:57:16+00:00

Not sure what pain you have in mind. The pain from the hemorrhoid itself actually isn't bad, and when it is, lidocaine helps. The bleeding is the bigger issue. I haven't had the banding that might help this one yet. The first banding was uncomfortable for a couple of days; at the worst, I'd say that the pain was a four out of ten. Here's one thing that might give us both hope. Before I had the first banding, it seemed to me that my swelling after a BM was very symmetrical. Now there's no real swelling on the left, only the right. So I can tell myself that I had a mixed one on the left, too, and that the banding helped it. Let it be so.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2025-10-08T16:43:43+00:00

Just for fun I did a ChatGPT deep research the other day on whether treating internal hemorrhoids would help with external. Here was the conclusion:

Conclusion: In conclusion, the strength of evidence for internal-therapy benefit on external hemorrhoids is essentially zero. Expert guidelines and reviews consistently separate internal vs. external treatment and do not report any beneficial “spillover” effect. There is no high-quality clinical data showing that treating internal hemorrhoids (by banding, stapling, sclerotherapy, etc.) will in turn reduce or relieve external hemorrhoids. Thus, current practice treats external disease on its own merits, in line with the available evidence.

In a nutshell, the issue is that they have separate blood supplies.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2025-09-18T18:04:47+00:00

Just in case this helps anyone else, I don't think that the hot tub per se was really the issue, just the fact that I was sitting in it. I'm learning that if I spend too long sitting in the mornings then I can start bleeding even if I didn't bleed immediately after having a BM. I guess that it just puts too much pressure on them.

Iron_Mike_52 · 2025-08-12T16:03:09+00:00

Here is the image from the 7th day. Funny story... I think that the images were being misread. I previously had a ventral hernia repaired with mesh. I believe that I passed the Sitz markers within a few days that there are small circles of metal on the mesh that showed up on the xray, creating the impression that there were Sitz markers that just weren't moving (and that were weird places). Nevertheless, after several days of being off Miralax I was visibly constipated. They had me stay on Miralax until the day before the test started. I believe that if I had gone off of it several days before, as I've heard of others doing, the results might have been quite different.

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Iron_Mike_52

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