need help with tennis ball in belly...

See your GI. Maybe he can figure it out with an upper endoscopy or GI series x-ray. Whatever was causing occasional problems has worsened to become chronic. I am concerned this is a hernia or tightening adhesions, so get it evaluated soon.

Jan

made an apt today...think it might be the adhesions since the tennis ball comes and goes depending on what/how much I eat....what are adhesions and how do you fix it?
thanks

Adhesions=internal scars

Treatment- surgical release.

Jan

Although adhesions don't come and go, their effects do. Many adhesion-associated problems come from the intestine moving while part of it gets trapped by an adhesion, and thus can't move along with the adjacent bowel. This can cause pulling, kinks, twists, etc. When the adjacent bowel moves back within range of the trapped part, the tension relaxes. It may help to visualize a load in the clothes dryer when part of a garment (e.g. a string) doesn't tumble with the rest of the garment. The bowel doesn't rotate quite so much as that, but it does like to squish around.

The small intestine moves around more than you might expect. It's normally attached to the back wall of the abdomen, although in a very loose, fan-like way (about 23 feet of small intestine are surprisingly attached to about 6 inches of the rear of the abdomen). Adhesions will commonly attach intestine to the front wall of the abdomen, or attach two parts of the intestine together, with ropy or band-like scar tissue.