Had the surgery 2/19 to remove the entire sigmoid colon and all the related lymph nodes.
Was in recovery 2/19 to 2/23 and released to go home!
The biopsy results came in late today and confirmed 0/12 lymph nodes were malignant. That’s it! It’s clean! No stage 3, no chemo required!
Follow up with the surgeon on 4/1 to talk about where we go from here, my guess is colonoscopies 2x a year for life now since it went from 0 to stage 2 in 6 months.
March is Colon Cancer Awareness Month, wear blue and get checked!
#✅UR:
Not sure when I’ll be back modding, I still feel like someone slammed me in the gut with a baseball bat. Cricket bat for our international folks! Maybe another 2-3 weeks.
I still lurk and comment occasionally, just as my health allows!
Edit Bonus - Since my wife had her own medical event this year involving a massive infection, spinal intrusion and below knee amputation, we already hit the out of pocket maximum on our insurance for the year.
Sooo…
Get insurance guys, no, seriously, get insurance.
Nice, enjoy!
Congrats! Nothing better than being cancer free, except maybe being cancer free for free.
Cancer free without the whole “gutted like a fish” part.
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!! I’m so happy for you! This was the post I’ve been hoping to see!
Glad to hear you’re cancer free! My father in law just had colon cancer removed a few days ago and we’re awaiting the biopsy results. Seriously: get checked, people!
Congrats! Sounds like an excellent prognonsis!
Also, Jesus fucking christ a 100000 dollars for a workup+surgery? A similar case is propably no more than 10-15k€ in northern europe (paid by the taxpayer of course).
You can see, the doc himself was like $7,800, the bulk of it being “hospital fees”. It will be interesting to see the breakdown on the UB-04 as to what those actual fees were. Probably tens of thousands for all the lab work every 3 hours and the heparin drip I was on.
Yea in get that, i was talking in terms of total costs.
E: actually looked it up, most likely the whole thing wouldve been max 10000euros to the taxpayer around here (Finland). Workup+surgery+hospital stay.
Nice!
Obviously you don’t have to answer since it’s personal, but I am curious: How does that effect your digestion? I always kinda wonder how much intestine you really need, because apparently it’s not all of it.
The colon is all about pulling water out of your stool to make poop, well… poop!
The sigmoid colon is the last line of that process. So without it, poop will still be poop, but maybe not necessarily as firm as it would be with it.
In my case, that works to my advantage, because I take statin drugs and statin drugs make me miserable. Having slightly looser stool might actually make me normal for a change!
Congrats! Nice to see you again and I’m glad it’s all working out! :D
Congratulations. It went by so fast. For some reason I thought you were european. Due to my wifes medical issues a long time back paying max out of pocket every year became the new normal.
Congratulations!
This post breaks rule 1.
✅
Huzzah! Glad to hear of it.
Congrats! So glad that it was found early;
it’s crazy that you have to pay for these life-saver visits and operations btw…w
America - for profit everything!
It’s really anti-human.
But, think about the capital…
Hey, glad to hear you’re doing better, even though the long term outlook isn’t the rosiest. Gastro surgery can be rough, and pain can impede the healing process so make sure to take care of yourself and take it easy.
Do you have family in the area (besides your wife, who you mention is also ill) that you can rely on right now? Not to scare you, but If I remember it took about 6 weeks to three months to recover from the more major gastro surgeries I had (I got complications though). Sigmoidectomy is pretty major. Normal (heh what’s that) might be sooner if you got laproscopic but I am a layperson.
Let me know if you need any Ilex or calmoseptine or don’t know what they are (you will likely need both as your gut adjusts to its new length)
My pain scale is marred by other things I’ve had so this really is barely registering. If I peg the 10 at “Spinal Stenosis”, so far this is like a 6, currently a 4. I didn’t even need the oxy today except to go to sleep.
And yeah, was laparoscopic, so I have 4 small incision sites instead of one giant one like with the open heart surgery.
As far as other gastro problems go, I was pretty screwed up by the statins they put me on for the heart stuff. So being a little more “loose” than normal is nice compared to that:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3291011/
Hopefully the two will balance each other out!
Long days and pleasant nights!
That is really great news! Hope you heal well and minimal pain. Best wishes to the both of you for a rapid end to this health rollercoaster and a smooth slide into your healthy new normal.
