Happy 4th of July? You get a colonoscopy!
As the name of this blog implies, I do intend to use it to share
my writing. I'm thinking mostly devotional-type posts and maybe
expanding upon sermons I hear. I have several drafts and a million
ideas to go that direction. However, I have had the most insane and
unbelievable summer of my 38 years and it feels very therapeutic to
write out and share what has happened. I hope you're in for a roller
coaster ride because it's cuh-ray-zay!
SO. In January of 2021, I started a virtual teaching job. It was insane and stressful and not something I ever want to do again. Ever. I got through the semester (January to early June) and decided it was definitely time to [finally] listen to my body and see what was going on to cause me nearly constant, location-specific pain. There were some gastro symptoms as well...but you do not want those details! I even managed to throw a week or so of having covid-19 into there semester along with an overnight field trip with one of my kids. I didn't think much about having little appetite and losing weight because of the severity of my covid symptoms. Let's just say I was in my bathroom a LOT. Like, a lot a lot.
Looking back, symptoms were probably present all the way back in January. However, at this point it is now mid-June. I couldn't get in to my regular doctor, and constant pain that was only mostly relieved by rotating acetaminophen and ibuprofen every four hours led me to a local urgent care. I saw a provider there and was given a prescription to treat a UTI. At one point the provider I saw said, "Let's hope it's a UTI because that's something quick and easy to fix." Yeah, that was some ominous real-life foreshadowing there. *sigh*
The prescription didn't help at all. I made an appointment at my doctor's office for about a week later. I decided to forgo the pain relievers that day to see/show the severity of my pain. Why? I wasn't convinced the provider at the urgent care believed my expression of just how bad the pain could be. I could tell the nurse practitioner I was able to see was extremely worried, but I didn't think much about it until a couple weeks later. After in-office x-rays that didn't really show any causes of such extreme pain (it definitely got to 10 on the pain scale intermittently), she asked me to stop at the lab and get my blood drawn before heading home. If the blood draw didn't show any irregularities, the plan was to try to get a CT scan done. She wanted answers just as badly as I did! I liked the plan, except for the need to convince my insurance company of the possible need for a CT scan.
A week later I was called and told that there were some issues with the results of my bloodwork. I needed to have it redone to rule out a fluke and/or confirm the abnormalities. I was also told that my insurance company denied a request for a CT scan. I went in for a second blood draw and didn't give it a second thought until July 2nd.
On July 2nd, I got a call from the doctor's office and was told to got to an emergency room and tell them that based on bloodwork, my doctor wants me to have a CT scan done. My first thought was honestly, "That's weird." I asked if it could wait until after the weekend, and was delicately told that going in THAT day would be a much better idea. Still unfazed, I hung up the phone and told my four kids that I'd be back to do my baking for the next day's farmer's market. I grabbed a granola bar and headed out to the hospital by myself.
I called my husband on the way to tell him what I was doing and why. Once at the emergency room, I finally began to think of reasons why I would have been told to go to the emergency room for a CT scan. There are no good reasons for that. I figured I was a low priority and in for a long wait. Reality started to hit when I was in a room and being seen by doctors in about an hour. I was taken in relatively quickly for the CT scan. After being taken back to my emergency room bay, I texted my husband (and parents, sisters, Bible study group, and farmer's market buddies) that I had a feeling I'd be staying the night in the hospital.
After CT results came back, I was told there was what looked like a "large and concerning mass" in my colon. Cue definite worry. No one wants to hear those words when their internal organs are being described. I sat and waited on more word from different doctors. I filled my husband in when he showed up after letting coworkers know what was going on. At some point the severity of the situation hit me and I remember saying "There is something VERY wrong with me."
The emergency room doctor passed me on to a GI doctor who told me I'd be having a colonoscopy in the morning. As a 38-year-old female, that was quite a shock! Now, in general, my body tends to do weird things. Not just the normal weird things, but really odd things that make no sense. Example? Ever since I was little, I will vomit if I get hungry enough. Yeah, that's a fun one to explain. It doesn't make sense and the majority of you probably don't believe me. Well, this strange body kept the act going for this hospital visit.
We all know colonoscopies are no fun. I was given the jug of bowel prep liquid and told to down as much of it as I could before midnight. I did okay for a little while, but then I got tired and kept falling asleep. I was exhausted! The tech kept coming in and encouraging me to just. keep. going. But I couldn't do it. And then at some point in the middle of the night, I threw up. My body was rejecting the dilaudin or the bowel prep. Or both. Either way, it was decided to stop attempting that and I was eventually given an enema to clean me out instead. Ow ow ow.
Around noon or so on July 3rd I was finally ready for the colonoscopy. Once in the procedure room, everything went well. The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the recovery area. The doctor came over with a stack of pictures and the written summary of her findings. We were told that it was a mass, it was 8 to 10 centimeters long and was blocking sixty to seventy percent of my sigmoid colon. It was also pushing on my uterus and an ovary. The doctor was very kind, caring, and apologetic. She told us that even though the pathology report needed to come back to be one hundred percent certain, she very much expected the results to be malignant. I spent one more night in the hospital and came home on the 4th of July. It was a holiday weekend I'll never forget!
Stay tuned for more of my cancer journey!
Oh, and in case you were wondering, I did eventually get a letter in the mail stating the cause for initial denial of a CT scan as "not medically necessary". 😆
Wow!
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