Abstract
Most of patients with complete bowel obstruction due to colorectal cancer are required emergency surgery. There are two important problems in emergency operation, one is a decompression of distended proximal colon and the other is a curability of cancer. In many cases, an emergency operation without examinations was performed. It seems to be dangerous to carry out one-stage resection and anastomosis at the same time when the proximal bowel of stenotic lesion is dilated. Because the patients are often under dehydrat-ed condition with electrolyte unbalance, and after operation they had sometimes septic complications, specifically wound infection and intraabdominal abscess, which make their operative risks poor. The traditional operative method for obstructive carcinoma was a staged procedure, namely, proximal colostomy or resection of the tumor with a colostomy. Decompression of the proximal bowel was achieved with a long tube inserted to the stenotic lesion of the left colon with the aid of a colonoscope in 9 patients. In all cases, one -stage procedure was performed after preoperative exminations and complete preparation of the colon. The method of inserting a decompression tube using a colonoscope was easy without specific material, so we recommend this method in the patients with obstructive left side colon cancer.
