I had recently had a baby and started experiencing some bleeding for a few months. I just passed it off as hemorrhoids. I just assumed it would get better on its own, but it didn’t. In fact, it started to get worse.
I mentioned it to my husband who encouraged me to go see a doctor. I scoffed at him and told him, “They’re just going to tell me I have hemorrhoids. Why waste a co-pay?” He kept nagging me until I finally gave in and went to see a doctor for the sole purpose of appeasing him.
My doctor ordered for me a colonoscopy just to have a look and see what was going on. I almost cancelled. Colonoscopy? No way. But there was my husband, nagging away. So I went in; I had the colonoscopy.
I will never forget lying in that bed and hearing him say, “We found a tumor.” He told me they would put a rush on the biopsy results and two days later, I heard the words, “You have cancer.” Blood work and a CT scan were immediately scheduled and the worst two weeks of my life followed.
The waiting; waiting to find out if it had spread and if I was going to die. I don’t wish it on my worst enemy.
The results came back. My tumors were in the normal limits and there was no evidence of the disease anywhere but the tumor in my sigmoid colon, the pelvic colon. I relaxed a little, but knew it wasn’t over.
The next step was surgery to get a definitive picture of what was going on. I had a little less than one foot of colon removed, along with several lymph nodes. My surgeon woke me up at 6 a.m., two days after my surgery to give me the results. No infiltration of the lymph nodes. Stage two: treatable, and curable.
Two weeks later, I met an oncologist. She told me stage II is usually treated with surgery and not chemo. I told her I never wanted to look back and regret not fighting as hard as we could. Just in case, we did some more testing on the tumor and learned it was moderately aggressive and would respond well to chemo. After talking it over with everyone, we decided to go forward and start chemo. My oncologist called it an insurance policy, in case any little cells escaped. “Let’s knock them out.”
I received 12 rounds of FOLFOX, six months of treatment. I worked through most of it, until I couldn’t any more. I completed treatment on May 10, 2017. Then three months later, I had a CT scan and blood work. There was no evidence of the disease.
I know I will live with the fear of it coming back my whole life, and if it does, I will fight it just as hard as I did the first time. Sorry, cancer, you picked the wrong girl.
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