Just coming back now after my stage 2 surgery…
Here’s the thing, my symptoms didn’t even seem to be colon or cancer related. I was having fatigue, out of breath, tired all the time.
Not unusual for a dude with 2 heart attacks and congestive heart failure, but the blood work was showing anemia, low red blood cell count, low hemoglobin, small red blood cells.
Something was chewing up the blood, but it wasn’t clear what.
Enter the colonoscopy/endoscopy… 17 polyps, 2 of which unusually large (20mm and 30mm). But NOT cancerous. Not even pre-cancer.
Rule of thumb is anything more than 5 or bigger than 5mm, you get re-checked 6 months later.
6 months later… 6 new polyps, and a 20mm monster that was full blown invasive stage 2 cancer.
Went under the knife 2/19, they pulled my sigmoid colon and all the related lymph nodes. If the cancer got into the lymph system, that’s stage 3 and cause for chemo.
Well, they got it all! No stage 3! But I’ve kinda been rolling around in bed ever since. 2 more weeks of recovery.
God damn, good catch! Wishing you the best of luck in your recovery and your remission.
Yeah, I tell this story because going from 0 to stage 2 in 6 months is terrifying.
Yeah that’s nuts. I’ve only heard of that in the super aggressive cancers like glioblastoma
Best of luck on your recovery!
Thanks!
hey, good luck on recovery. I don’t know much about cancer recovery, but i’ve had so many gastro surgeries that they named a room after me at the hospital on the trauma ward. if you ever need a listening ear, send me a dm.
Between my wife and myself, we’re in the same boat with the Emergency Room.
“Oh, room 13? Yeah, we know where that is…”
have they gotten on your case for muting the iv pumps yet? they’re so easy to mute and i don’t need hearing loss, right?
We bug them and make them do it until they get sick of hearing from us and mute it themselves. LOL.
When you’re down to the last 100 ml of saline and reprogram the pump to slow down so it won’t run out so the alarm doesn’t go off and then you page your nurse, just FYI that’s too far. That’s the one that really got me in trouble
That’s awesome! I hope you have clear sailing and everything is rainbows from now on!
Working on it, Friday was a tough day. Lots of pain and feeling sick. 🙁 Pretty much lost the whole day.
But our kid and his wife came over to help out and that was good!
Family is what gets us through things like this.
I got diagnosed last year at 30 years old. I had lower abdominal pain that lasted a little over a month that I figured was IBS from a traumatic life event that recently happened. It was slowly improving until one day I woke up in extreme abdominal pain. There wound up being a mass at the very start of my large intestine.
The doctors found no obvious reasons as to why it happened- no family history, no substance abuse, no excessive energy drink or alcohol consumption. I now make a large effort to cut out as much processed food in my diet as I can.
I would suspect processed food too. It seems like this trend has tracked with the rise in ultra-processed foods.
I’ve done the same. The most processed food in my diet these days is cheese. The best number of ingredients to be listed on a package is one.
The best number of ingredients to be listed on a package is one.
Is that even legal in the US?
Only if the ingredient is HFCS.
also MSG
Question MSG on the internet and people will call you racist.
I just use it. I was at the carneceria (Mexican meat market for all y’all uncultured you know what get your assets to the local Mexican grocer they’re awesome see for yourself) and saw “Peruvian Super Spice” and color me intrigued, right? Pure MSG. Cracked me the fuck up.
Processed foods have been around since at least the 1970s. We were eating Kraft dinner, La Choy, Doritos, canned foods, tv dinners, sugary cereals etc.
Got my first colonoscopy coming in two weeks.
Fingers crossed.Pro Tip:Whisk(e)y is considered a clear liquid. And if you are lucky, you can have your colonoscopy at a teaching hospital and get to have a train run on your ass by 3 or 4 med students practicing on you while you are sedated.
Good Luck! I’m pullin’ for ya!
If it’s not one type of cancer it’s another. I’m certain a scientist found a way to kill cancer cells and the pharmaceuticals buried it. Cancer and flu are highly profitable businesses.
Some populations are more at risk than others. Alaska Natives have the highest documented colorectal cancer mortality in the world, but Siegel said that, because the total number of Alaska Natives is so small, it’s hard to get funding to study why.
I don’t doubt that it is difficult to get funding (especially now), but seems kind of dumb.
If anything such a small population in a relatively isolated environment seems like it would allow researchers to better control variability. Unless it’s strictly a genetic risk factor, it would seem that any significant environmental risk factors they find could then just be helpful when determining what risk factors to consider in bigger heterogenous populations, right?
