The Big C

Getting check for cancer may have saved my life

I happily awoke from my colonoscopy on Friday with my doctor looking me straight in the eye.

“Am I on Grey’s Anatomy?” I said nonsensically as one does from coming off anesthetic.

“You have a tumor,” the nice doctor said. “Get dressed. I’ve called your husband.”

This was not the news I was hoping for. A polyp maybe two. But secretly I knew there was something not right. This had been confirmed by a FIT test, the preventative package sent to patients which tests stools for blood.

Constipation had been dogging me on and off for months. Now I know I have a partial bowel blockage which is a tumor. I’ll call him Joel.

Joel is like a menacing asteroid that is leaving me just enough room to squeeze out a softie, but he has been blocking anything else which explains everything. The bloating, the stomach cramps, the 3 a.m. pooping using a footstool. (Yeah, that’s a thing.)

Joel is right near the rectum, which meant the doc couldn’t even do a colonoscopy and was probably cooling his heels for half an hour while I snored softly and muttered sweet nothings to Dr. Dreamy.

The nice doc explained to me that I will require surgery, maybe chemo and/or radiation, and more testing will be required to see if Joel had been playing with other organs behind my back. This is not the yellow brick road I’d been expecting and it definitely wasn’t taking me to the Emerald City.

“Once we have the pathology back, we’ll get going on this,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was smiling or frowning under the mask, but he had nice eyes. Kind eyes, and a bed side manner that was business-like but pleasant.

“What are you having for dinner?,” he asked.

“Sushi,” I said.

“Chew the rice really well.”

It’s hard not to think about it every waking minute, and imagine the worst. Last night, I took a gummy and it reminded me that I was so lucky to have Scott, my friends and my adult children to count on. A lot of people have no support system at all.

The hardest part was telling the kids. I was their only parent for a decade before Scott came long. As a kid raised by a single mom who died from a similar bowel issue, I know what they’re thinking right now. It’s hard not to go there.

I’m hoping for the best, but life isn’t fair.

As Gloria Vanderbilt famously told her son Anderson, “I never ask why me, I ask why not me?”

It’s been a bad year so far. I lost my job in January, and my 11-year-old pug died in February (how could she leave me at a time like this?). Now I probably have cancer in March. What will the rest of the year bring?

Hopefully not Donald Trump.

Anyway, I’m still here, on a low fiber diet which pleasant enough. Basically, I have to eat all the foods that kids love — Wonder Bread, pasta, corn flakes, ice cream along with mushy vegetables. Right now I’m making hot and sour soup. Tonight it will be meatballs and pasta with strained tomatoes cause Joel doesn’t care for seeds much.

We’ll see where this journey takes me. But I do have a piece of advice — and I’m probably burying the lede here. This is Cancer Awareness Month. Get that damned FIT test. It probably saved my life.