STAGING

Coming home from the hospital after finding out I have cancer was devastating.  I felt so sorry to myself because I hadn't gotten myself looked at months ago.  And sorry to my kids and my family because I felt like I had let everybody down.  But I had to keep my head on straight.  Had to start making phone calls, to an oncologist, to a surgeon, to my insurance company, to my supervisor, to family and friends.  I had to get things moving, had to take charge of this thing.  I had no idea my son was sitting at his desk crying while listening to me on the phone.  I thought he was just focused on his homework  My daughter cried openly the rest of that first day right up until bedtime.

I hadn't eaten much in the days leading up to the colonoscopy because of the amount of pain I was in.  Eating just made it worse.  By now I was so hungry I didn't care about pain, I just wanted to eat.  I decided to make a big pot of my chicken noodle soup because I thought it would be easy on my system and it just sounded good because some cooler weather was coming.  Later that afternoon I got a call from the office of the gastroenterologist who did my colonoscopy.  The woman said, "Have you eaten anything yet?"  I said, "No but I'm getting ready to."  And she said, "Don't eat.  We can get you in for an ultrasound tomorrow but you can't eat.  And you'll have to do one Fleet enema before you come in."

I remember the tears coming again at the thought of being told I couldn't eat still, the one little comfort I was so looking forward to.  This was my 2nd full day of nothing but fluids and I felt miserable.  If you know me at all you know I love to eat.  I was so hungry and weak.  I think my electrolytes were off balance or something because my muscles and joints were in pain and I was shaky.  But I stayed on the liquid diet and I did the Fleet enema, and let me just say that it's really not easy to do one of those yourself.  Fortunately I was already completely empty with a squeaky clean colon to begin with...but if I hadn't been it would have been messy.

So now it's 1:30 on my third day of a liquid diet and I was going in for this ultrasound.  I was surprised when I got there to find out it wasn't just a regular ultrasound, it was an endoscopic ultrasound and they would be giving me propofol again.  One moment I felt myself falling asleep and the next I was waking up.

They staged it as T3, N0, M0 which meant the tumor size was a 3, but no nodes were involved and no metastasis.  I remember feeling relief just knowing there were no nodes involved yet which in my mind meant I had a good chance of fighting it.

Waking up this 2nd day from the propofol left me so groggy, wobbly, and slurring my speech.  I wasn't able to come out of it fully until later that evening.  (I was so weak my brother had to help me walk to the car, and later at home my son told me not to take the stairs by myself).  My mom, my brother, and me went to pick up my son from college, then they took me home.  I remember getting into my pajamas, heating up a bowl of my homemade chicken noodle soup, and sitting down for that first bite of food in three days.  It was Heaven.