A mum who woke from a scheduled operation to burn off a cyst to the shocking news she had a stoma bag and an ovary and fallopian tube had been removed is now celebrating personal and professional happiness free from crippling pain. For months doctors had struggled to find the cause of Michelle Tonge’s constant agony, that saw her rushed into hospital one Christmas Day with a suspected appendicitis – only for examinations of the organ after removal to show it was fine.
Then her second child was induced at 37 weeks, only to become distressed and be delivered by emergency Caesarean, as specialists suspected he was causing Michelle’s excruciating lower abdominal pain. But when surgeons scheduled an operation thinking a cyst was behind her problems, but were plunged into an emergency situation when they found a leak had stuck her bowels, ovary and fallopian tube together, they took drastic action to save her life.
Michelle, 32, who lives in Coleford, Gloucestershire, with her carpenter husband Robert Tonge, 34, and their children, Emilia, 11, and Alfie, nine, said: “When I woke up I just screamed. I was hysterical. I had a stoma bag on the outside of my body collecting my waste, all these drains everywhere and I was hooked up to a morphine drip.
