When gastroenterologist Melanie Lynn Jackson needed someone she could trust to perform acid reflux surgery on her own chronic illness, she turned to Adrian Park, MD, at AAMC.
I’m a gastroenterologist, and I come from a family of medical professionals. My grandmother was a nurse, my father was an internal medicine physician in Philadelphia. I found a good opportunity here in Annapolis, and I joined a group practice.
The problem I have is that my esophagus, my food pipe, does not contract properly. Normally your food pipe has contractions to get the food down, but mine doesn’t contract well at all. Additionally, where it meets the stomach it was very tight. So, the food pipe was starting to get big, stretching where food was trying to go through something very tight.
I was diagnosed with the condition back in 1999 when I was in medical school, and I did some non-surgical methods to treat the problem. That worked well for many years, but then when I became pregnant, my symptoms got worse. That’s when I decided to have surgery. Once I heard that Dr. Park was coming to town, and I read his bio, there was really no excuse to not do the surgery now. He was an expert in this type of procedure.
The surgical recovery was probably just about a week or so. Because it was laparoscopic, so you have just the small incisions. The biggest thing was not being able to lift. Of course having a two year old, it was very difficult to lift my daughter who is about 20-25 pounds. I couldn’t do that for about a month. I still have to take my time, swallow my food. I do have to make lifestyle changes, such as small, frequent meals. That’s going to be permanent.
