One of the little things that I’ve been told to do is to flush my toilet twice whenever I go to the bathroom in the first few days after a treatment, since the chemo drugs are toxic. It was communicated as a “just to be safe” type of thing.

Ignoring for a moment the whole toxic chemicals passing from my body into the water system, my toilet uses 1.6 gallons of water per flush. Let’s say I go to the bathroom 3 times a day. That means I’m now using 4.8 more gallons of water per day that I was before.

4.8 gallons x 10 days per month x 6 months = 288 excess gallons of water used just by me.

I’m having a hard time finding the answer to what I thought would be a simple question for Google: how many people in the US receive chemotherapy each year? Since all of the drugs are tracked and controlled, I assumed that this sort of information would be publicly aggregated somehow, but apparently it isn’t. All I can find is people complaining about the data not being available.

However, at only 3,500 people (and I’d assume that there’s way more people than that going through chemo a year), that’s a million gallons of water.

I realize that there’s all sorts of problems with my math and assumptions here (not everyone has the same kind of toilet, same length of chemo, same frequency of elimination), but it does feel like there’s an unintended consequence here that I certainly never considered before.

I got disconnected from the portable infusion pump this afternoon, so I’m officially done with the first chemo treatment. The nurse came to the house and the whole thing took about 5 minutes. Unhook the bag… flush the line with saline and heparin… and then out comes the needle. The most uncomfortable part was the adhesive holding the needle in place pulling out a few more chest hairs (this is something I’ve gotten used to over the last couple of months).

It feels good to be able to walk around unencumbered. The portable pump isn’t terrible, but it’s a bit awkward. They hook it up so that there’s about five feet of tubing going from my chest to the pump, and then everything’s contained in this small bag that you can sling over your shoulder or wear around your waist like a fanny pack. You then just have to be careful not to forget that it’s hanging over the back of your chair when you get up to walk away (which I managed to only do once).

At the suggestion of one of the nurses I spoke to before my treatment began, I picked up something called a Poppy Pocket, which is a combination elastic band and pouch. You wear it around your chest and then the pump and bag go in the two pockets that hang down. Then, everything’s contained underneath your shirt/clothes. I tried it out yesterday and today, and it works well, though it still takes a little getting used to. Ultimately, though, it let me move around without having wires hanging everywhere.

I worked from home yesterday and today since I wasn’t sure what to expect with treatment #1. I think that we’ve figured out that Fridays during a treatment week will probably have to be a day I work from home, since lugging all the necessary equipment that’s needed for the disconnect (gloves, saline and heparin syringes, a sharps container, etc.) into work isn’t exactly convenient. However, I’ll probably be able to go into work on Thursdays if future weeks are anything like the last couple of days.

As far as side effects go, things are still pretty mild. I felt a little more queasy today than I did yesterday, but it wasn’t bad and I didn’t have any problems eating or keeping food down. Between 6 and 7pm I got extremely tired and ended up taking a nap for a few hours. While sleeping that much in the evening normally keep me up all night, I’m still feeling like I won’t have much difficulty falling asleep.

Day one of chemotherapy treatment is technically over, though I’m still hooked up to my portable infusion pump which will dose me with 5FU (fluorouracil) for the next forty-six hours (well, forty-two at this point).

I had a lot of anxiety going into today. I didn’t sleep well the past couple of nights, even with the lorazepam that my doctor had prescribed for the insomnia I started experiencing after my surgery. I know what the list of possible chemo side effects is, but, understandably, no one can tell me exactly how this is all going to affect me. Am I going to sail through treatment with relatively few side effects, or are they all going to hit me hard? There’s no way to tell.

My wife tells me that I was a little scattered when we met with my oncologist this morning. I’m thinking they’ve probably seen that a lot.

So, here was my day:

My appointment was scheduled for 12:30pm. We got to the hospital a little early, just after noon. The waiting area was much busier than my first appointment (when we met the oncologist and talked through treatment options), and my nurse later mentioned that any week following a long weekend is a little hectic. I was easily the youngest patient in the waiting room by 20 years, if not more.

After a few minutes, the phlebotomy nurse called my name and I went into a small exam room. Despite having this handy port installed last week, she did a finger stick, and then slowly… squeezed… twenty… drops… of… blood… out… of… my… finger… one… at… a… time. It didn’t hurt very much, but it was uncomfortable, and the whole time I just kept thinking, “it seems like there would be a better way to do this”.

Back to the waiting room, and after a few more minutes my name was called again and I was brought back to have my vitals taken. I got used to this when I was in the hospital recovering from surgery: blood pressure cuff, finger monitor to check the oxygen saturation in my blood, and temperature. They also add height and weight, which I learned was because the chemo drugs are titrated based on those measurements. I also learned that I’ve shrunk by half an inch. Either that, or I was slouching…

My wife and I then met with my oncologist for about half an hour. We went through the list of side effects one more time, mostly because of my anxiety about them, and I wanted to hear about the range of problems one more time. I like my oncologist. She explains things clearly and is easy to talk to.

Back to the waiting room, and a few minutes later I was called back to the treatment room. Here’s where the fun began.

The treatment room is a large open room with a lot of individual areas that can have a curtain pulled around them. In each small curtained area is a comfortable chair that reclines, a chair for someone who’s there with you, a TV, an IV pole, and a cabinet/station for the nurse to work from.

We got settled and met my nurse.  I say “my nurse” because she’ll be the one I see every time I come in for treatment. I like that they handle it that way. I’ll be going through treatments every two weeks for six months; it’ll be nice to see a familiar face and build a relationship with someone.

We went through some orientation paperwork (and a large box of home care supplies) and then everything got started. My treatment regimen is a pretty standard one for my type and stage of cancer. It’s a trio of drugs commonly referred to as FOLFOX: fluorouracil (also called 5FU), leucovorin, and oxaliplatin. All of them are administered via IV.

Here’s the rundown of my afternoon:

• A small needle gets stuck into my port and hooked up to the IV drip (all of the medications get infused with a dextrose-based (D5W) solution, instead of a saline drip (at least this time).
• 2:05pm: the nurse starts an infusion of a small dose of dexamethasone, a steroid that’s supposed to help counteract some of the side effects.
• 2:20pm: dexamethasone infusion is done, and an infusion of ondansetron (Zofran), an anti-nausea med, begins.  Another proactive treatment against side effects.
• 2:33pm: ondansetron infusion is complete, and we start an infusion of calcium and magnesium, another effort to counteract some of the possible side effects (mostly the peripheral neuropathy that can be caused by the oxaliplatin).
• 3:04pm: ondansetron is done infusing, and now we start the big doses: both the leucovorin and oxaliplatin are hooked up and start dripping into me.
• 4:11pm: a nurse stops by to check my vital signs. I’m still breathing.
• 5:07pm: the leucovorin and oxaliplatin infusions are done. The nurse hangs another bag of calcium and magnesium.
• 5:35pm: calcium and magesium infusion is done. There’s now a syringe with a bolus of 5FU that gets injected into the IV.
• 5:42pm: 5FU bolus is done injecting. The nurse disconnects the main IV pole and hooks up the additional dose of 5FU that’s attached to the portable infusion pump that I’ll be taking home. This dose gets administered over 46 hours, and then a nurse comes out to my home/work to disconnect it on Friday.

And then we went home.

Sitting in the chair all day, I felt… okay. I didn’t feel sick or nauseous. My head was aching a little bit, but wasn’t painful. It felt more like how you feel when you don’t get enough sleep, which, let’s face it, is the case with me over the last couple of days. With all the fluids being pumped into me, I also had to get up and go to the bathroom about five times.

Now that I’ve been home for a few hours, I’m still feeling okay. I’ve got instructions for which anti-nausea meds to take over the next few days (since that’s a predicable and hopefully preventable side effect), and eating a light dinner wasn’t a problem.

I’ve already noticed one side effect that I was warned about: cold-induced neuropathy – basically a sensitivity to cold. I haven’t felt it in my hands yet, but when we got home I poured some water from the dispenser on our fridge, and took a sip.  The sensations are hard to describe, but here’s the best I can do: my lips felt tingly, almost like I was drinking something carbonated; the inside of my mouth felt like it was getting a mild shock; and the back of my throat felt like it was closing up (it wasn’t. I could still swallow). I grabbed a thermometer from the kitchen drawer. The water was 50 degrees, so, not super cold. I guess no ice cream for me for the next few days.

So, at this point I’ve got the portable infusion pump connected to me via a long tube, and we’ll see how it goes sleeping with it in. Friday I get disconnected, and then it’s wait a week and a half until my next treatment. Onward and upward.

I had my port (officially called a Port-a-Cath) put in today. It’s a small titanium button-looking thing gets installed underneath the skin right below my collarbone. Then, a small tube connects from it into my vein. That way, when they need to give me all of the IV chemo drugs every couple of weeks, they just stick a small needle into the port, rather than having to do a new IV into my arm every time. Plus, they can also draw blood from it for blood tests. Very handy.

The procedure was simple, in that it was a lot of waiting around after which I remember nothing, since they sedated me. Right now it’s covered by a bandage that I can’t remove until Monday, and it’s painful enough that I need to take tylenol pretty regularly. The doctors tell me it’ll feel better in a couple of days and that I’ll barely notice it after a week or so.

I am now the perfect fusion of man and machine…

Photo Credit

Photo by Tristanb and used in accordance with the Wikimedia Commons license.

I’ve spent the last 24 hours convinced that the cancer had spread to my liver. I was very freaked out and had a lot of trouble concentrating on anything. Spoiler: the cancer hasn’t spread to my liver. I’m fine (in that, nothing is any worse than it already was).

Last week my oncologist sent me for a chest CT. I’d had an abdominal CT just before my surgery (since the most common place that colon cancer spreads to is the liver), and it was clear, but my oncologist wanted to get my chest checked out, too. Just a precaution, I was told… nothing to worry about.

So, this past Monday, I get a call telling me that the CT showed a small (1.3cm) spot on my liver. It’s probably nothing, they tell me, and in a patient who didn’t have my history/diagnosis, they’d think nothing of it. They also looked at my earlier, abdominal CT and the spot was there, as well. So, I need to come in for an MRI, so that they can rule out anything “bad”.

This is the point where I start to get a little anxious, but I’m pretty good at keeping my brain in “one step at a time” mode, so I’m not freaking out too much. The thing I am wondering at this point is why no one noticed this spot on my first CT scan. WTF?

Wednesday afternoon I go into the hospital and get the MRI. I’ve heard that some people get claustrophobic inside the MRI tube, but it didn’t bother me. It took a little longer than the CT scans (I was there close to two hours), but it was a pretty painless procedure.

Okay… so now I’m back at work the next day, and I get a call around 3pm from the radiology department. The scans came out fine (meaning, the pictures were readable, not that they were telling me anything about the results), but they wanted me to come back in for a second MRI so that they could use a different contrast fluid that lets them look at the liver better. Could I come back today at 5:30? Sure.

This is the point when my brain starts becoming convinced that the cancer has spread to my liver.

So, after the second MRI, I went home, and was totally freaked out. I called my parents and told them what was going on, and then felt bad worrying them when I might find out in less than 24 hours that everything was fine.

This morning, I called my oncologist and left a message asking for a call-back with the results. She got back to me within an hour, and told me that I had a benign lesion on my liver – not cancer related and nothing to worry about.

This isn’t one of those “they tell me I’m lucky” moments, this is one of those “I’m actually lucky” moments.

Brain now returning to normal function… emotional levels equalizing…

Photo Credit

Photo by BrokenSphere (Own work). Used in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, via Wikimedia Commons

I’m starting this blog on my first day of chemotherapy treatment, but in the interests of chronicling my whole experience, I’m writing a few posts that go “back in time”.  I’ll try to present things as clearly as I can remember them.  Given that this has all happened over the last few months, that shouldn’t be too hard. Also, I’m writing about colon cancer, which means that from time to time, I’ll be referencing things that I otherwise wouldn’t talk about in polite company (stool samples, bowel function, etc.). Fair warning…

After I was finally released from the hospital, things were actually pretty easy at home. It’s amazing how comfortable your own bed and couch feel after being in a hospital bed for five days. Add to that the fact that you don’t have an IV needle in your arm (or hand), and it’s bliss.

I had planned to be off from work for three weeks after my surgery to recover, and when I was planning to be out I couldn’t really envision being at home and not in contact with work at all for that amount of time. I’d probably want to check email every once in a while and make sure that everything was okay, right? Nope. I truly stayed unplugged, and I think that was a good thing.

The first week that I was home, I was tired and moving around very slowly. I was comfortable when I was lying down or standing up, but the transitions between the two were awkward and a little uncomfortable – not shooting pain or anything, but enough twinges of pain that I was careful when I was getting up or lying down. I spent a lot of time lying down, and dozed off into naps from time to time, partly due to pain meds that I was still taking. This then really messed with my sleep schedule, so I often found myself up until 2 or 3 AM, and then sleeping until 10 or 11 AM… or, let’s be honest, 12 or 1 PM. I didn’t have to go to work the next day, so it wasn’t a problem, but after a week or two, it was a little strange how off my hours were.

Towards the end of the first week/beginning of the second week, I didn’t need to take any prescription pain meds any more (percocet, which is basically oxycodone and tylenol), and was just taking tylenol periodically if I needed it, which was mostly later in the day, especially if I’d been moving around a lot.

They (the doctors, nurses, etc.) want you moving around as much as you can. Like my pacing the hallway in the hospital, this started with me just getting off the couch several times a day and walking around my house – doing laps from my kitchen to the living room and back again, pausing to pet the cat as I walked by her favorite spot to perch, from which she was watching me closely. Under normal circumstances if I was on the couch she’d be in my lap, so she’d had to make some adjustments while I (or, at least, my lap) recovered.

When you’re sent home from the hospital, you get a packet of discharge instructions, and it covers a lot of detail, but the one thing that is left incredibly vague is diet. I was told that I didn’t have any dietary restrictions, but that I’d want to “take it slow” with eating normal food: eat smaller meals and milder foods to start with, and work my way back up to complex/spicy/interesting food.

This sounds fine in theory, but it leads to a guessing game and we really wished that there’d been some food guide that got handed to us instead: something that laid out a suggested diet plan for the first week or two. That would have been incredibly helpful. While I didn’t have any bad reactions to food, every time I added something back into my diet I was wondering whether I would have a bad reaction to it.

For the first few days, I did keep it simple: scrambled eggs and toast, plain pasta… things like that. After three or four days I had some plain chicken and rice, a tuna fish sandwich, and started moving onward from there. Most resources we found online suggested not overdoing it on the amount of fiber, so I actually had white bread for the first time in years. I’d forgotten how amazing white bread is. It’s like the best thing since… well, you know.

The thing that I was warned about before the surgery was that it might take a while (weeks to a couple of months) before my bowel function was back to normal. My surgeon told me that this could mean anything from having looser stools for a while, having to go to the bathroom more frequently, having to go to the bathroom less frequently, or something else completely. It’s one of those places where all they can say is that it’s different for everyone.

Before the surgery, this part of the recovery had me pretty worried. I think that most of us take going to the bathroom “normally” pretty much for granted, and I wasn’t looking forward to several weeks to two months of it being “off” in some way. Thankfully, I was pretty lucky and things started working and feeling “normal” pretty much after the first week or two home.

Prior to my surgery I was connected to a friend of a friend who’d been through the same surgery about five years ago and got a chance to ask him for any advice/thoughts based on his experience. He told me that your body pretty much tells you what it’s ready for, and as long as you don’t push to hard and overdo it, the recovery is pretty smooth. He was right. As the days went by I started to feel a little better, and I’d do a little more: go for walks, drive to the grocery store, go into the grocery store, wear something other than pajamas (a prerequisite for me before going to the grocery store, despite what I see some other people wear there), go out to dinner, etc.

For me, three weeks at home was enough time to feel good enough to go back to work. And so I did.

I’m starting this blog on my first day of chemotherapy treatment, but in the interests of chronicling my whole experience, I’m writing a few posts that go “back in time”.  I’ll try to present things as clearly as I can remember them.  Given that this has all happened over the last few months, that shouldn’t be too hard. Also, I’m writing about colon cancer, which means that from time to time, I’ll be referencing things that I otherwise wouldn’t talk about in polite company (stool samples, bowel function, etc.). Fair warning…

The symptoms that led to my diagnosis started in late April/early May. I saw my primary care doctor at the beginning of June, and by the end of June I’d had tests run, been referred to a gastroenterologist, had a colonoscopy, and been delivered a confirmed diagnosis of a malignant tumor in my descending colon. I do feel lucky that this all happened so quickly. I’ve heard way to many stories about people being misdiagnosed for months/years, and in my case, what started as some pretty vague symptoms were definitively diagnosed in just a few weeks.

I met with a colorectal surgeon in Boston at the very beginning of July to discuss what the next steps were. The next steps were to remove the section in the middle of my colon that the tumor was growing in (along with a little extra on each side) and then stitch the two ends back together. Allow a little time for me to recover and I’d be all set. Official name of the procedure: a partial left colectomy.

This is one of those times when a doctor is telling you something that sounds like a big deal, and they refer to it as routine. I think that’s supposed to make you feel better, and on some level I suppose it’s comforting to know that you’re not dealing with some once-in-a-lifetime event, but it’s not all that comforting.

I’d been referred to the surgeon that I met with by a friend who works for a gastroenterologist (not the same one that did my colonoscopy). That plus going to one of the major hospitals in Boston definitely made me feel like I was getting the best care I could.

The initial consultation was pretty straightforward. The doctor described the basics of the procedure, and confirmed that they’d do it laparascopically, which meant that my incisions would be smaller and recovery would be faster. The highlights of what I was told:

• The surgery itself would take 2-3 hours
• I’d probably be in the hospital for 2-3 days. They’d basically let me go home once I was able to get up, walk around, and go to the bathroom.
• I should plan on taking 2-3 weeks off of work after the surgery to recover
• Recovery wouldn’t be bad. I’d have some pain and sensitivity at my incision sites, would have to ease back into eating and would probably have some decrease in my appetite, and would be tired and need to rest. The doctor actually said that the biggest thing that recovering patients report/complain about is fatigue.
• It would also could be as much as two months before my bowels might get back to normal. While it adjusted to a section of it being removed, I might have to go to the bathroom more often, etc.

There was one moment during the meeting that totally took me off guard:

Doctor: “We could do the surgery soon, if you wanted.”

Me: “When’s soon?”

Doctor: “Thursday.”

Me: “…”

What felt like a minute, but was probably just a few seconds went by.

Me: “Do we need to do the surgery that soon?”

Doctor: “No, this isn’t an emergency situation, we’ll just need to wait a few weeks if we don’t do it this week.”

I opted to wait, as I definitely needed some time to prepare for being out of work for 2-3 weeks. My surgery was scheduled for July 26th.

The next few weeks was the time when the name for this blog was born. Many well-meaning people in my life told me that it sounded like I was really lucky that I “only” had to go through this surgery and then it’d probably all be okay. I know they meant well, but after a while, that really got to me. This wasn’t a flu shot. It wasn’t a quick outpatient trip to the hospital. It could have been a lot worse, but it was a BIG FUCKING DEAL, and I got very tired of people talking like it wasn’t (despite their best intentions to try and spin things positively).

Waiting also got hard the closer the day of my surgery got. I was definitely nervous, mostly because I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. I wasn’t so nervous about the procedure itself; I didn’t think that I was going to die on the operating table or anything, but I just didn’t know how I was going to feel afterward, and how long it’d take me to get back to feeling “normal”.

Remember how everyone warns you that the worst part of a colonscopy is the prep? Well, that’s not true for surgery, unfortunately, though there’s also a prep to go through. This time, the stuff I had to drink was different: magnesium citrate. It’s not pleasant, but I was able to get it down. It’s a clear liquid, but it’s a little thick and bitter. However, I only had to drink 10 ounces of it at a time, so it wasn’t so bad.

The day of surgery was actually pretty uneventful for me, since I was asleep for all the real action. We got to the hospital and I was brought up to the surgical waiting area, changed into a hospital johnny, and laid down on a gurney to wait. Over the course of the next hour or so, I spoke with nurses, an anesthesiologist, my surgeon, and a surgical resident. Several people went over my medical history and the details of the surgery. I found out that not only was the surgery being done laparascopically, but also robotically. I’m not gonna lie to you, Marge… I thought that was pretty cool. At the time, I posted the following to Facebook:

Found out that there’s a robot involved in my surgery. We live in the future, people.

I remember being wheeled into the operating room, moving from the gurney onto the operating table… and that’s it. Next thing I knew, I was waking up in recovery. After a little while there, I was wheeled up to my room.

For the first couple of days I was hooked up to a pump that would deliver pain medication (morphine, I think) whenever I pressed a button, as often as every six minutes. This worked very well while I was awake. The first night, I fell asleep for several hours straight, and when I woke up, I was hurting, and was hammering the button pretty hard. After 15 (well, probably 18) minutes or so, I was okay.

It’s hard to rest in the hospital, even when you’re tired after surgery. There’s a lot of noise, even when everyone’s trying to be quiet at night; a nurse comes in every four hours to take your vital signs (blood pressure, temp, and blood oxygen levels); and you’re uncomfortable because there’s an IV needle sticking into you. I ended up sleeping for an hour or two here or there.

Getting out of bed for the first time was strange. I had no idea how to move my body. Getting back in was even weirder, and one of the nurses had to help me swing my legs back onto the bed. They want you up and moving around as much as possible, though. Surgery shocks your system and walking around helps wake everything back up.

For the first 24 hours I was very sore and in noticeable pain. In general, things got better each day. At the end of day 2 they took me off the IV morphine and I was able to drink some water, and then they started giving me pain meds orally. Late on day 2/early on day 3 the catheter got removed (that was one of the weirder experiences in my life) and it was easier to get up and move around.

The big “event” that they’re waiting for after surgery is for you to pass gas. That shows that your digestive system has woken up and is moving again. Unfortunately for me, this didn’t happen very quickly. The original “2-3 days in the hospital” estimate ended up being almost 5 full days. I’ve never had so many people ask me about whether or not I’d farted…

Not only wouldn’t they let me leave until I’d passed some gas, but they also wouldn’t let me eat solid food. So, for four days, I only had liquids: beef or chicken broth, Jello, and a frozen flavored ice of some kind. I came out of the hospital close to fifteen pounds lighter than when I went in.

I was really down on my fourth day there. In retrospect, I feel bad for both my wife and the nurse that was on duty that day… I was pretty inconsolable. By that time, I just wanted to go home, I hadn’t slept at all the night before, it was my wife’s birthday and I felt bad about still being in the hospital, and I was just wanted my body to get with the program.

The next morning, I farted. Never in my life was I so happy to do so. You’d better believe that I reported it to the nurses and the doctors that came by on rounds in the morning. A little later that day, I was allowed to have some solid food. Scrambled eggs and toast never tasted so good.

Once I ate and held down the food without any problems, I was cleared to go home, around 6pm on day 5. The nurses had all been fabulous, my roommate had been a very nice guy, and the eggs were delicious, but I was so happy to get out of there and get back to my own bed.

I’m starting this blog on my first day of chemotherapy treatment, but in the interests of chronicling my whole experience, I’m writing a few posts that go “back in time”.  I’ll try to present things as clearly as I can remember them.  Given that this has all happened over the last few months, that shouldn’t be too hard. Also, I’m writing about colon cancer, which means that from time to time, I’ll be referencing things that I otherwise wouldn’t talk about in polite company (stool samples, bowel function, etc.). Fair warning…

Sometime in May 2012 I started having some pain in my abdomen. At first it was just a couple of times a day, but after a couple of weeks it was bad enough that I called my doctor for an appointment. By this time, I was feeling some level of discomfort or outright pain throughout the day, and there were times when it was acute enough that I needed to stop whatever I was doing and take a few deep breaths while the pain passed.

I’d tried to pay attention to my own body and habits a lot. Was it worse when I ate certain foods? When I didn’t get enough sleep? At home? At work? Nothing seemed to jump out at me, and nothing big had changed recently in terms of habits (good or bad). So, when I went into my doctor’s office, I felt like I was able to answer his questions well, but everything I had to say was a little non-specific. I had pain, but I couldn’t tie it to any specific events, foods, activities, etc.

My doctor is pretty conservative, and tends to treat the symptoms you have without going overboard. He’s not the kind of guy that hands out a super-strong antibiotic for every cold or immediately sends you for a bunch of unneeded scans or tests. Overall, I think this is a good thing, but it also meant that I was prepared for the conversation we had after I described my symptoms:

“So… what’s new in your life?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re describing symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, or IBS, which can often be caused or made much worse by stress. So, what’s new at home, at your job… in your life?”

We talked for a little bit, with me telling him that I’d been trying to look at those sorts of questions/factors as objectively as possible, but that I didn’t see anything relevant. Work was busy, but no busier than usual, and there’d actually been a few things that had happened in the last couple of months that were making things a little less crazy than usual. My diet hadn’t really changed. I was generally feeling okay otherwise… We also discussed possible food and environment factors that could be at play: lactose intolerance, gluten allergies, things like that.

Ultimately, I said something like “all I know is that this has been bad enough for long enough that I know I can’t have it continue like this. I need to do something.”

So, he ordered a few tests and sent me next door to the hospital.

There’s a lot of shorthand that happens when you go from one doctor to another or from one doctor to a lab. I encourage everyone to ask a lot of “so, explain to me what’s going to happen next” questions, because otherwise, things can get a little confusing. To wit…

I go next door to the hospital lab and they draw a few vials of blood. Then, the nurse asks “did you already schedule your lactose test?” “Huh?” I say intelligently, since I have no idea what she means. Apparently, the lactose test is done over two and a half hours, and is normally done first thing in the morning, since you have to fast for it. No problem, I say, even though it’s ten o’clock, I haven’t eaten yet today, so let’s do it now.

The lactose test consists of you drinking a gritty mixture that contains roughly the amount of lactose in a single meal, and then they draw blood every 30 minutes for two and a half hours. It was a heck of a morning.

My doctor also requested that I bring back a stool sample to the lab, and had the lab give me three “cards” for a fecal occult blood test (this has nothing to do with witchcraft, by the way). The cards each come with a flat wooden stick. You’re supposed to open each one up and use the stick to smear a small amount of your feces onto two boxes. Then you fold them up and bring them back to the lab. So, this is gross. Collecting ones own stool sample is also gross, and a bit complicated. Best left there.

A few days after I brought the stool sample back to the lab, I got a call from my doctor’s office. They found blood in my stool, and so they wanted to have me see a Gastroenterologist. They referred me to someone nearby who luckily had an opening just a few days away, so I didn’t have to wait long.

The consultation with the gastroenterologist was a relatively short appointment, during which I was told that I needed a colonoscopy. The blood in my stool was indicative of a variety of possible problems, and ultimately, there wasn’t any way to be sure exactly what was going on without one. I scheduled it for the following week.

If you ask anyone who’s had a colonoscopy about it, you’ll probably hear the same phrase repeated (I certainly did): the prep is the worst part.

So, let me tell you a secret about colonoscopies: the prep is the worst part. The prep basically involves drinking some amount of stuff that doesn’t taste great, and that makes you go to the bathroom. A lot. I do remember ingesting all of this stuff and then sitting there for a couple of hours thinking “nothing is happening… what happens if nothing happens…?” And then, it all kicked in, and I was running to the bathroom every 20-30 minutes, eventually wondering how there was anything left inside me.

Actually having the colonoscopy was uneventful. I showed up at the office, changed into a gown and had my info reviewed by a nurse, and then was wheeled into the procedure room. You’re given drugs to sedate you so that you’re not really aware of what’s going on, and I don’t remember anything about the procedure. Ultimately, I woke up in the recovery area feeling fine.

Once I was awake, the doctor came and reviewed the results with me. They’d found one polyp that they’d removed, and a tumor in my descending colon that they’d taken biopsies of. The doctor confirmed that this tumor was likely the cause of my abdominal pain, and that even if it was benign, it should be removed. Then, he dropped the bomb: “Based on its size, I’d be surprised if it weren’t cancer.”

It would be dramatic to say that “everything stopped” at this point, but it didn’t. I went into “one step at a time” mode instead. I asked a handful of additional questions and said thank you. The doctor said that he’d be following up with me in a few days when the biopsy results were back. While the word “cancer” definitely had me freaking out a little, there didn’t seem to be any point in worrying much until the test results came back.

Three days later, the doctor called me and told me that the biopsies had come back positive. Adenocarcinoma was the official medical term in the report, and it meant that the tumor was malignant and definitely needed to be removed.

At this point, I was more upset and worried, but was still mentally taking it one step at a time. From everything the doctor said, it was likely that I’d just need surgery to remove the tumor, and then that’d be it. A surgeon would be able to give me more details. So, the next step was meeting with a surgeon and scheduling the surgery…

Photo Credit

Photo by Alex Proimos and used in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution license.