HIFU

has anyone gone to mexico for the HIFU procedure? if so, and if its not too personal, could you please tell me about your experience? my husband and i are headed out next month and i'm a bit apprehensive. thanks in advance

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hi leslie0003
I went to Puerto Vallerta Mexico for my HIFU treatment in Oct 2007. It was the easist medical proceure I ever had. Less pain than a flu shot. My surgery was early in the afternoon and I was out of anesthetic enough to go back to my hotel room by 5 PM. I fully expected to need room service for dinner, but surprisingly after resting for a few hours we went down to a dining room in the hotel
at about 8 PM. The next day we were tourists again. In other words, a piece of cake! I was 77 years old at that time and was able to take care of emptying the pouch even in airports and planes and also had no problem washing the catheter exit site on my abdomen once a day with no assistance.
Relax and make the trip a mini vacation. Good luck.

If you are apprehensive about going to Mexico, there are 4 Sonablate HIFU sites in Canada at Winnipeg, Manitoba, Niagara, Ontario, Toronto, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec. The USHIFU can give you phone numbers and contacts for all the site. I know that the Toronto, Ontario site CANAM HIFU I believe it is called has a phenomenal post operative nurse called Gina who helped me to resolve the issues I had after the procedure. The Winnipeg site has an excellent urologist who did my procedure.

hey davehhi

 thank u so much for ur response. hearing from someone who has been thru it makes me sort of believe we can actually do this. bless u for responding and congratulations on it working out so well!

leslie

hey doc,

did u have alot of post op HIFU issues?

I had a few. I had a large prostate that needed to be shrunk and when I had the procedure the prostate was still 34.5 cc, it was originallly 72cc. As a consequence I was on the operating table for 4.5 hours which would account for some of my post operative problems according to Gina. I experienced quite a bit of pain immediately after the procedure which is not normal but that was quickly resolved by the urologist by just altering the dose of one of my prescriptions and added a pain killer. The pain was gone in a day or two. I did have some plugging of the suprapubic catheter a couple of times and had to go to emergency to get that resolve. Later I had some pain during urination and Gina said that due to my prostate being so large, the prostate was still inflamed and causing this problem. So she told me to get a prescription for anti-inflamatory drug and anti-spamotic drug, Detrol LA. That eliminated the problem. The second problem was trying to get to the conditions of only urinating every two hour and voiding at least 80% of the bladder contents. The problem was that I was drinking too much water. The post-operative care book state to drink 8 to 10 glasses of water and I took a glass as 12 ounces instead of 6 ounces. As a consequence I was drinking 120 ounces of water instead of 60 ounces. Gina told me that they recommend drinking only 48 ounces a day so I reduced my intake to 48 ounces. Once I changed the volume of water consumed I was able to meet the conditions necessary to get the suprapubic catheter removed.

  I hope this helps. If you want to read my complete story go to www.yananow.net and look for TV under HIFU.