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Pelvic Congestion

Pelvic congestion...no my abdomen does not have a cold, haha. What this means, is that the veins in my pelvis, are too large, or over-dialted. This condition can be found in an MRI, however only the very bad cases of PC show up on that. Mine was found through a veinography, which is where the doctors insert a tube-like instrument into my groin, and put a stick thing insdie the tube and laces it up through my veins. Dye is inserted into my veins, and a picture can be seem of what my veins look like. In my case, although my dialted veins could not be seen on the MRI, when they went in for the veinography, it was found that I did have this.

The symptoms of this condition, is chronic pelvic and lower back pain. Sometimes my lower back and pelvis would actually swell up when the blood pooling got really bad. The pain in the pelvis usually gets worse when standing.

There are two ways to treat this condition:

One is the more invasion way, which is where a number of coils are inserted around the dialted veins, and tied off to stop the blood from pooling in them, and making them too large. Blood will still find its way to my pelvis using other veins.

The second way to treat it, which is the way that I was treated, is called a vein embolization, and it is when the doctors insert some gel-like substance into the dialted veins, which sort of clogs them up. It does the same thing as the coils, except this is not permanent, and every few years, you will need to go in for more gel, when it wears off. The hope is, that after the gel is in there, the veins with make themselves smaller on their own, and there will be no need to go in again.

After the embolization my pelvic pain was 100% gone...pretty amazing, huh?