About Me
I’m 41 years old, male, and live in Massachusetts with my wife and son.
In May 2012 I started feeling some abdominal pain on a pretty persistent basis. After a few weeks, it got bad enough that I was feeling some level of discomfort throughout the day, and at times it was bad enough that I had to stop whatever I was doing and take a few deep breaths. That’s when I made an appointment with my doctor.
Some tests got run… I was sent to a GI specialist for a colonoscopy… and they found a tumor in my descending colon. After a few days the biopsies confirmed that it was malignant and I needed to have it removed. So, at the end of July I had a partial left colectomy, and they removed about a foot of my colon.
A week later, the post-surgery pathology reports confirmed that the cancer had spread to one lymph node. So, now it was official, I had Stage 3B colon cancer, and a course of chemotherapy was recommended.
I’m starting this blog on my first day of chemo treatment. I’m being treated at one of the big hospitals in Boston, and I’ve been kicking around the idea of chronicling my thoughts for a little while – partially for my own benefit, partially so that my friends and family have a place to go to see updates, and partially so that others who are going through similar events and treatments will have a (I hope) fairly accurate picture of the process behind it all. While I’ve learned that no one can tell you exactly how the treatments will affect you personally (everybody reacts differently to the drugs… blah blah blah), I think knowing as much about how all the events unfold definitely helps.
Overall, I’m trying to take a “light at the end of the tunnel” approach to my treatment. I’ve got to go through it for six months, and then I’m done: no more surgeries, no more treatments. That’s it. They’ll watch me for the next five years, and as long as there’s no new tumors, I’m cured. The next six months are going to suck, but then I’m done.
They tell me I’m lucky. Lucky that I “only” needed a routine operation to remove my tumor and “only” need a single course of chemotherapy. Compared to those who have to go through years of radiation and chemotherapy battling complex and deadly cancers, I am lucky, but I’m not looking forward to any of this, and I wish that I didn’t have to go through it at all. But six months I can handle, and then I’ll be just fine.
Photo Credits
Photo by twid and used in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license.