Two months of believing I had colorectal cancer
I apologize for the text-heavy strip, but since I'd been holding back information for so long about this, I wanted to make it as detailed as possible. I've shared many things with you guys, my loyal readers. You've been with me through the greatest moments in my life with I married Laura, and the worst moments of my life with my parents dying. And now I get to add another small chapter of my life to the site, where I believed I was going to die soon.
No, seriously, this was messing with my head pretty badly. For the months around Christmas, I was in a pretty bad funk and having a bit of a breakdown due to it being the first Christmas without mom. A Midlife Stressor from what I've researched. So what does life decide to throw at me RIGHT at the end of that, but a damned good reason to think that I've got cancer myself. Other main symptoms for colorectal cancer I had include weight loss, excessive gas, more liquidy stool, and needing to use the bathroom more often. Now, what throws off all of THOSE symptoms is that we had just started eating a lot healthier foods in general a few weeks prior to the bleeding starting, which would account for my weight loss, runny crap, and crapping more.
The gas was a bit of a wildcard. A little known fact about me... is that I am incapable of burping. Hell if I know why, but for my entire life, I've never been capable of voluntarily burping. One or two might find their way out by accident, but I literally am unable to induce a burp. If I say... drink a carbonated drink, the gas has two options. Painfully pass through my digestive tract as gas, or if it builds up too fast, induce me to vomit, whereas I dry-heave the gas out of my stomach. Seriously, this aspect of me is really frickin' annoying.
So, we have THOSE things happening, and just having the unfortunate misfortune to go to doctors who's referral doctor for this type of thing is booked to hell and back.
THANKFULLY, I finally got myself a family doctor who's nice, seems to know his stuff, was concerned, and what really sold me on him was that he was literally pissed off at how long away a referral the other places gave. Thus, under two weeks later, and I've been scoped and the doctor quickly identified the source of the bleeding. Not a large polyp or something as I had suspected, but just... inflamed, pissed-off tissue.
This guy was ALSO thorough, and grabbed a few chunks from inside of there to biopsy, just to check for anything out of the ordinary (I got to watch all of this on a big screen... quite interesting, actually. And no, no crap got in the way. From the medicine and diet of the last 24 hours, I was literally as clean as a whistle. On a related note, my body weighs exactly 130.0 lbs when it's absolutely devoid of food or water.) In 10 days, we'll have the results from that, and at THAT point, I'll have a more official clean(er) bill of health.
For the next month, I take some medicine to tackle the inflamation, and we'll see where things to after that... although I imagine they will probably be going in a significantly better direction that where I figured it was going to go originally.
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As some of you may know, I've been talking for like... 2 months about some medical issues that have come up with me. I've been keeping details back until I had an idea of what I was dealing with.
To make a long, and frankly disgusting story as short as possible, I was passing blood every time I dropped a deuce in the crapper. And not like "Huh... that looks a bit like a red spot", but moreso "Wow... that's some pretty damn red water now."
*shink*
So, that's like... primary symptom number 1 of colorectal cancer. I've had several others... weight loss, some others, but those COULD have been for other reasons. The fact that both my parents died of cancer however pretty much cemented that as being the most likely outcome in my mind.
Needless to say, I was freaked RIGHT the hell out. Lacking a family doctor after having moved to the city from the country, I went to a walk-in clinic, which after pissing around for a week of tests to check for blood (since clearly my saying 'enough blood to turn the water red' wasn't believable), referred me to a gastroenterologist.
CLEARLY this idiot didn't care enough to bother to put ANY details into the referral, since the end result of THAT was that I could get a CONSULTATION in late OCTOBER to ARRANGE an appointment... over 8 months after this all started. Because yeah, it's common medical practice to allow profuse internal bleeding to be left untreated for 2/3rds of a year!
By that point, I'd gone to an emergency room as well as got another referral. The end result of that was an appointment in mid-June. Still crap. I was ALSO looking for a family doctor in the city through all of this. I found one taking patients, and he was awesome to say the least.
To make THAT long story short, HIS referral got me an appointment in under 2 weeks, today specifically. I had the colonoscopy done this morning, and was assured that there was NO sign of anything cancerous whatsoever! It's all been caused by an inflamation like ulcerative colitis. I'll correct that name in here if I find out what it actually is.
*slice*
So WOOOH! They took some samples to biopsy to be safe, but I'm not AS worried about those. Gotta take some medicine and go back for a follow-up in a month, but all in all, I'm a LOT more relieved than I was months ago. This could kick around from time to time, but at least it tends not to reduce lifespans!
