Here's To A Complication

I'm 10 days post op, and up until Friday I was doing amazingly well.

Esophagram and post op visit was on Thursday (6 days post op) and was told everything looks great, scar and all. So I was upgraded to mushy foods early and was ecstatic.

I get home Friday and noticed that I had some dried blood in my navel. Then I pay more attention and blood, very slowly was coming out of a corner of my incision. The nurse on call told me that it can happen and so to apply pressure and keep it bandaged for it is bound to stop. Fast forward 24 hours, I get up from my couch and all of a sudden I feel dripping from the bandage.....it was gushing, i was soaking gauze like nobody's business and I personally went into complete freak out mode.

My poor boyfriend freaked out along with me and the on call nurse told me to go to hospital as its not typical to be gushing blood more than a week after the operation.

I hailed a cab and was in the hospital in less than 20 minutes.

The ER was packed but I at least got a bed within the curtains so I wasn't lying down in the middle of the hallway as most people. After a long time and various checks I was told that I had a hematoma and that the blood is old (it was dark colored all the time) and they pocked around my wound a few times (causing me some serious soreness and pain) and said let it drain. I was sent home 7 hours later, with a bandage and instructions to watch out for fresh red blood. That to put a stitch on the wound would be more hurtful than beneficial.

Sunday rolls around, still bleeding, not as much as my scary incident but pretty much non-stop.

This morning I finally got to see my surgeon and he was like, 'well we had to make a big deep cavity to place your port and its more than likely that the cavity filled with blood. It is better to just let it drain to avoid abscess or infection. As a precaution i'm going to send you with some antibiotics and it should be good as new in a few days'.

I'm still bleeding and even though I feel great in every other respect I am relieved, but had no clue that something like this could happen just because.

Has anyone else had something like this happen? How long did it take to finish bleeding/scar to heal?

Thanks!