Medical update
I didn’t have anything ready for today and did not feel like rushing to get anything written, but there are new developments with my medical stuff so I thought I’d bore you with that.
Last Tuesday was the colonoscopy. The prep was not as awful as I had feared. I did over-buy supplies (good purchase = instant Jello, bad purchase = white grape juice) and if I had it to do over, which I will in ten years, I’d have gotten preparation H or something similar for irritation as well because by the time you are done emptying out, you are going to need it. Word to whoever has that coming up in their lives anytime soon. Anyway, went in the next day and got it done and they found diverticulosis (pockets in the colon), which I was already pretty sure I had, but no polyps. Fine by me. I have other issues I need to deal with; I didn’t need a new one.
I don’t understand doctors who don’t talk to you. He popped in both at the consult and after the procedure long enough to give me necessary information, briskly, and then was gone again. I get that I’m on Medicaid and it has a low payout, but I’m just as human as the patient on a Cadillac plan. Shit.
Anyway, so today was the breast biopsy. The good news is that they do numb you up well, or your doctor should if they’re worth a damn. The bad news is that it’s still really weird and if you get skeeved out by medical stuff, the tissue sampler clicks when used. UGH. I’m somewhere in between on the skeevy thing. I once saw a guy’s injured hand in the ER as I was admitting him to the hospital because he had gotten it caught in a motorcycle chain and had to show his mutilated fingers to the doctor, and that didn’t freak me out, but the thought that someone was digging around in my boob and clicking things in there wasn’t so okay. She turned out to only need two samples instead of three from the second site and I was so grateful. I hate that thing.
No, I don’t know how it turned out. Colonoscopy is straightforward; if they see something, they can tell you right away. A biopsy has to go to the lab.
I have no opinion on how it will turn out. I feel like nothing will come of this, but sometimes cancer sneaks up on you. So it feels safer to not assume anything.
Whatever the result, I suppose I’ll write about it here again. I overshare at the best of times.
This all resulted from my first mammogram. I don’t think starting sooner would have changed anything. Let’s say I started at age forty, right? So that would probably have turned out clear, and then I would have developed the problem spots over time. Or possibly sooner, given that a mammogram is a specialized x-ray. One thing almost no medical provider tells you is that x-ray radiation is also carcinogenic. I heard someplace that in Europe they always do ultrasound scanning for breast cancer screening. I wish that were true here.
It reminds me of actor Chadwick Boseman dying from colon cancer and how everyone said that more awareness of colon cancer screening would have saved him. He got it young, okay? He would have been thirty-nine when diagnosed. That’s not even old enough to meet the most conservative screening recommendations. A friend of mine was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer at her first colonoscopy and had had no idea there was anything wrong, whereas Boseman likely had symptoms. Point is there is no use guilt-tripping people about the screenings they get. If you want to make a difference in cancer survival rates, make screening more normal and accessible. I was amazed, when I got out of the Army, that civilian annual exams look at pretty much nothing on your body. They ask you some questions, they weigh you, they do some basic bloodwork, and that’s it. Doctors learn almost nothing from that except whether you’ve gotten fat, at which point they prescribe usually inappropriate or insufficient interventions which mean you need more help later. And that’s the best-case scenario where you stay in one geographical area your whole life and keep the same doctor, which almost no one does anymore. And we wonder why all this shit goes horribly wrong.
Anyway. We’ll see what happens. Whee!