How I got here: History and how we discovered the cancer

So, here’ how I got to where I am.  We don’t know how long this has been in my body.  The doctors said it has probably been for some time now.  They guess about a year.  I’m thinking longer as there are several symptoms that I am hoping are linked to the cancer, namely the tendonitis in both my right hand and right achilles.  The tendonitis in my hand stopped me from being able to edit my pictures for quite some time.  The tendonitis in my Achilles finished the job, as I was unable to predict when I could walk.  I was on crutches every 2 months for over a year, and was on and off them less predictably for the year or two before that.  I am hoping they are linked because if they are linked, then that means they will go away after treatment.

I got a job as a high school teacher at the beginning of the 2009-2010 school year.  The first semester was mostly amazing.  However, towards the end I started getting really tired.  I assumed it was just regular teacher tired.  I also started experiencing some bowel irregularities that I just chalked up to stress.  (I won’t go into detail by what I meant there.  A little too personal!)  At the beginning of 2010, those problems started becoming more frequent, and I also started experiencing some mild abdominal pain.  Normally I don’t really pay attention to pain in my body, because it I did, I’d be running to the doctor every week.  Something has to linger around for a good month or two for me to start taking it seriously.  The abdominal pain didn’t go away, and I missed school twice thinking that I had the stomach flu.  In April, I went into one of the clinics on a Saturday, after missing school the day before.  That is the first day I remember thinking “hmmm…This abdominal pain is getting pretty bad.”  Unfortunately, I had used all my sick and personal days and didn’t feel like I could go to the doctor.  (a mistake from which I have definitely learned from)  I can’t beat myself up too much, because there is a liklihood that they still wouldn’t have found anything.  That Saturday in April when I went in to the clinic, they sent me to the emergency room at a local hospital to get a cat scan of my abdomen, just to make sure that it wasn’t appendicitis.  It wasn’t.  As the year progressed, the abdominal pain persisted, and John and I just chalked it up to probably having an ulcer from the stress at school.  Needless to say, I was pretty excited when school ended because I knew I could start going to a doctor to maybe check it out some more.  After Italy I said.

The previous times they had done blood work that spring, they had always told me “You are a bit anemic” and then gave me some number.  I didn’t know what the number meant, or what normal was supposed to be.  And even the records show that it wasn’t all too crazy anemic.  I’ve never taken anemia seriously because all I’ve heard of anemia is something some girls got with a heavy period, eat some red meat and you’ll be fine. 

Jump forward to the days after the last day of school.  I was finally being able to de-stress and relax, and it seemed to help the abdominal pain.  I figured again, “aha!  It for sure must be an ulcer.”  On the flight over to Italy it started hurting again.  When I got there, I told John “I feel like something ripped open again”.  When I was there, the pain started getting worse and worse.  At one point, I told John “I need to go to the hospital.”  The host family we were with called the pastor over because he also happened to be a doctor, thank God!  I was originally worried about my electrolytes, because I felt like I was about to pass out.  The doctor did some vitals, found nothing wrong, and told us he would take me to the lab for some lab work, just to be safe.  Here is where this whole process officially began.

He returned two hours after I had had the labs drawn, to personally give me the results.  He looked a bit somber.  He told me that I wasn’t just anemic.  I was extremely anemic.  I was in fact so anemic that were my count to drop even the slightest bit, he would have to do a blood transfusion.  This is when I finally decided that it was worse that I was probably thinking.  He recommended we take as flight as soon as possible, which we did. 

Upon arriving home, I immediately made an appointment with a gastrointerologist and told him the story, and that we were concerned that I might have an ulcer that was bleeding to the point of anemia.  He scheduled a duel endoscopy/colonoscopy to look in my stomach, and my large bowel (large intestine).  He didn’t find much except some rough patches in the duodenum (I think…) and 2 polyps which turned out to be pre-cancerous.  (I’m not sure what the difference is between pre-cancerous and cancerous.  I just know that they remove something that is pre-cancerous, and then check back in a year to see if there is any new growth.  Not that big of a deal)  The rough patches were something he had seen plenty of times, and pointed to what he believed was celiac sprue disease, which meant that I would have a gluten allergy the rest of my life.  I immediately went off all gluten  However, he was shocked to find that the biopsy for celiac sprue came back negative. So, after this, he scheduled to have something called a “pill endoscopy” which is the coolest thing ever.  They have made a miniature camera that you can swallow which goes through you, taking a picture every half second, and wirelessly transmits them to a hard drive strapped to you.  He called me back the next week to tell me that they have found something, or rather 2.  There were some sections in my small bowel that were all gnarled and raw and bleeding and that they more than likely pointed to Crohn’s disease.  However, there was also some things that seemed to point to a mass like structure, and he scheduled me for a CAT scan the following day.  He was also worried because some of the gnarled places were so bad, that it took the camera 20 minutes to pass through the first one, and an hour to go through the second.  He was really worried about me having obstruction, and immediately put me on a liquid diet.  He had me to a special blood test that would confirm Crohn’s, After the CAT scan, before we had even left the hospital, he had called to tell us that he was already with the radiologist looking at the scan and wanted me to come in for another one the next day.  After the second scan, he immediately called us again, and told us that he could squeeze us in for an impromptu meeting upstairs where he told us that the thickening of the walls were bad enough, that I needed to see a surgeon.  It was Friday, so the surgeon scheduled me for the very first appointment the following week.  He explained to me what they were thinking, and scheduled me for surgery that week to remove part of my small intestine, which took place that Friday, September 3, 2010.  That next Wednesday, they got the biopsy that it was cancer.  I’ll go into where we are now in the next blog so that this one doesn’t get too crazy long.