Kiriakou’s post-gastrectomy complications are the sequence of failures that followed the removal of his stomach in September 2022. John Kiriakou places himself in the roughly five per cent of patients for whom the operation goes wrong, and has required two follow-up surgeries; the first, he says, came after he almost bled to death internally and spent eight days in hospital.[1]
Eighteen months of vomiting
He vomited heavily from the first days after surgery and assumed it was the body’s response to trauma — “They took out my stomach. I’m throwing up. That’s just the way it’s going to be.” He mentioned it to his doctor only in passing, a year and a half later. The doctor’s reaction was that this was not normal: it should have stopped a week or two after the operation, not persisted for eighteen months. Blood tests showed he was malnourished.[2]
An endoscopy found extensive scar tissue, which the surgeon cut out during the same procedure. Kiriakou was discharged after four hours. He then travelled to Greece with his son, and the vomiting returned.[3]
The night on the kitchen floor
Two days after returning home he worked a Saturday from ten in the morning until ten at night and went straight to bed. At two in the morning he woke sweating — an experience he now associates with blood sugar falling too low rather than rising too high — and assumed he was having a hypoglycaemic episode.[4] He has no memory of going downstairs. He woke half an hour later on the kitchen floor, tried to stand, and fainted again; another half hour passed before he came round a second time.[5]
He shouted for help until one of the two lodgers who rent rooms in his house woke. It was three in the morning. Together the two men carried him to the couch, where he lay for another hour and was given a full-sugar Coca-Cola, which did nothing — the point at which he concluded the problem was not hypoglycaemia at all.[6][7] A final attempt to lift him into bed put him out again, and an ambulance was called.[7]
Of the hospital he remembers only a doctor shouting his name and telling him he was going straight into surgery.[8] He woke at ten the following morning to the explanation: “You had a massive blood clot sitting on top of a massive ulcer right at the surgical site.” His blood pressure on arrival had been 80 over 52 — “50 is death. So I just made it” — and the surgeon told him another hour would have been too late.[9] The clot was removed and the ulcer sewn up.[10]
Asked why he had not noticed that he was bleeding, Kiriakou gave the answer that had hidden it: “I love ouzo and so I eat black liquorice all the time and so it’s always black.” He was told to stop, and did — “I never ate liquorice again.”[10][11]
The recurrence, and the trade
The following August he recognised the sensation returning in the middle of the night and told his girlfriend it was happening again; they drove to hospital and he was admitted straight into surgery with another blood clot.[11] The surgeon’s verdict was that he is among the five per cent in whom the operation leads to clots. Kiriakou’s own accounting is unsentimental: “I would rather deal with blood clots and be skinny than to be fat and diabetic.” He now takes a blood thinner.[12]