Nuss Bar Removal

In 2013, three years after my Nuss surgery, I consulted with my doctor and we decided that it was time to go ahead and have the bar removed. Now, with this procedure, the reason they keep the bar in your chest for so long is because there is no way for them to physically tell whether or not the cartilage connecting your ribs to your sternum has grown back completely and able to support your chest wall. X-rays can show you that there is cartilage there again, but it can't show you if it is sturdy enough to support your rib cage on its own without the bar. For this reason, the keep the bar inside adults for 3-5 years, just to make sure. In children I believe they only keep it in for 1-2 years because of how fast their bodies are growing.

I decided to have mine taken out at three years instead of five for two reasons. The first reason was that my husband and I really wanted to have a baby and the doctor suggested that I not get pregnant while the bar was in my chest; since then, I have done further research and there have been several women who have gotten pregnant with the bar still in them and everything was just fine. My second reason was that on my left side I felt a constant pinching and tearing right where the bar was that made it uncomfortable for me to work out our do things that required me to stretch my left arm up. Since I am a very active person this made it very annoying for me every time I wanted to work out, to feel like I had to limit my left side on all things. So I talked with my doctor about each of these things, and he said that he believed I was fine to have it taken out at three years, especially since my bones seemed to be very pliable and flexible. I was SO EXCITED!!  In fact, excited is an understatement, I was over the moon that this thing was going to be out of me once and for all and I would be able to finally look normal.

 This was the bar that was removed from my rib cage 

The doctors told me that it was a simple same day procedure and I should be fine in 2-3 days, but I didn't really trust that since my recovery time was WAY off at the beginning of all of this. So I scheduled an entire week off of work just to be sure. My husband took me in early in the morning and they hooked me up to the IVs and everything, which luckily they got right on the first try this time, nurses like that are the best! Then they wheeled me back, knocked me out, and took that bar out of my chest. I woke up about and hour and a half later in my room. I was so tired I could barely open my eyes, but my husband kept trying to wake me up and talk to me. They told me that they needed me to drink some juice before and wait about 10 minutes for it to settle before they could let me go home. It was at that time that I realized I wasn't in any pain, not even a little bit. I wasn't sore, my left side wasn't pinching any more and I felt great! I was so tired though I couldn't really jump up and celebrate. They told us we could leave, and I walked out of there just fine. I got home and passed out for a few hours, which felt great. I felt so good that the next day I called up my boss and said that I would be going back to work the next day and wouldn't need the rest of the week off. I was so relieved that this process was quick and easy, especially with how long and painful the first surgery was.

This is my husbands hand comparing the size of the bar

Going back a little bit to my left side pinching and tearing. I had mentioned this to my doctor a few times before I had the bar removed, and he had told me that it wasn't anything, and it was probably just because I was babying that side and if I just worked through the pain it would get better. As nice of a doctor as he is, he was wrong ha ha. I tried working through it and it just made it more uncomfortable. Luckily, I was able to prove the doctor wrong when he went in to remove the bar. After the bar removal, the doctor told me that the bar had somehow adhered/attached to my rib, so that each time I moved too much on that side, the bar was tearing the cartilage and pinching me on the inside. When he removed the bar, he actually had to saw away a small part of my one rib that it was attached to in order to get it out. So, moral of the story is that YOU know your body best, not the doctors :) I don't blame Dr. Mitchell though, he is still one of the best doctors I have ever had, but they can't feel what you are feeling so they have to go off of what they know and have had experience with.