On September 10, 2014 I was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. I'm coping surprisingly well but I'm still in shock. It's not that I now identify myself as a cancer patient as if my whole identity has become that, but let's face it, I'm a cancer patient. Just to think it is shocking enough, but when I hear myself saying it out loud I feel like I'm lying or playing a joke because it just doesn't seem real. I have always had to balance being too optimistic or too pessimistic when it comes to serious matters. Neither is good. So now that I'm dealing with one of my most dreaded fears having come into being, my mindset right now is keeping that balance in check by being realistic and focusing on what needs to be done. So if you see me burst into tears while doing everyday normal things, it's the shock and disbelief hitting me again.
Looking back I can now see all the symptoms I've been experiencing the past year as being due to the cancer. I started having rectal bleeding around the spring of 2013, just a few drops on the toilet paper, bright red blood. I assumed it was hemorrhoids, which I knew that I had, so I wasn't worried. After having an appendectomy in July 2013, I attributed all my new symptoms to recovering from that surgery since I'm a type 1 diabetic and it takes me a lot longer than normal to heal. Even a mosquito bite takes months to heal, so I wasn't too surprised that my digestive and bowel habits had changed, seemed to slow down. About 5 or 6 months after the appendectomy I noticed that the rectal bleeding had changed now to being a few drops of blood inside what I call pus balls. I was concerned about it, but then in the beginning of 2014 it stopped for a couple months, so I stopped worrying about it. By the spring it started again. But my ex was taking me back to court to lower child support, my son was graduating from high school, and my mom was about to have a hip replacement. With all the stress going on in my life I decided to wait until my next doctor appointment in July. I told her I'd like to be looked at in there to see if this was hemorrhoids or something else, so she referred me to a specialist. The specialist had me take suppositories which didn't clear up the blood-filled pus balls, so she suggested I get a colonoscopy. At this point I was definitely worried.
By this time it was now mid August, 2014, and after spending 5 days dealing with insurance and trying to figure out where I could get a colonoscopy within my coverage, I was so worried I didn't know what to do with myself. But I finally got an appointment for two weeks later. In those two weeks everything started to change. I began having sharp pains in various places in my low abdominal area. I sometimes felt a tight squeezing and dull pain in the area of my kidneys and ureters and perineum. I lost my appetite. Sometimes I was nauseated, and that's rare for me. None of these symptoms made sense and I couldn't figure out what could be wrong with me. I knew it had to be something with my colon, but I figured I was having some kind of inflammatory bowel disease or something like that. When the pain was most pronounced I could pass a rather large amount of this bloody pus, which was now no longer little balls but nearly a handful. Yes, I was extremely worried now.
Finally time for my colonoscopy prep. It was hard for me, being a diabetic, but I followed the prep to a tee and was more than happy to get this colonoscopy out of the way. I chose to have the propofol so that I wouldn't be awake and worry through the whole thing, and I expected to wake up and be told I had a blockage, or abscess, or fistula or something. But when they woke me up and the doc came in he said he found a very large tumor in my sigmoid colon starting to go into my rectum and that it looks malignant. "You have colon cancer," he said. I was in so much shock hearing that. I never in a million years expected it to be cancer. I cried. I was so scared just at the thought of not knowing how bad or how far it had spread. My mom had taken me to the hospital for the colonoscopy since I had the propofol and wasn't supposed to drive. On the ride home all I could think about was telling this awful news to my kids and knowing how sad and upset they would be. My daughter turned 17 in August and my son will be 19 in November. All I could think about was that I don't want to die, I don't want to leave my kids this soon, and that I have too many things to do in my life. I was just so afraid that this was the end for me.
