Actually. Not my ass but ironically my lower back and it may just not have anything whatsoever to do with cancer. I f$#%ing hope not. What the hell are you talking about, Dave? Pain? Lower back? Wtf?!
Let me catch you up.
Back in the summer I began to notice a pain...more like a dull soreness in the middle of my lower left back. At first I thought it was just related to packing and lifting boxes and furniture in the move out of our condo into a house in June / July. I thought to myself...it's just a pulled muscle. A strain. A soft tissue injury. Or maybe my body is just complaining that I had done some physical activity that it wasn't used to for a loooooonnnnnngggggg time. At least before the diagnosis and surgery.
But the pain didn't go away.
I started thinking to myself "am I imagining this?". Should I tell Victoria? Should I tell my doctors? Surely they will just fluff it off as nothing major..stop worrying about little stuff like a little discomfort in my side. Will my oncologist think I am just being paranoid, am seeking attention? That I need to be sick and for doctors to be examining me, paying attention to every little sore I report in order to feel that I am being watched out for? That I am not being lost? That's ridiculous.
So I decided to report the discomfort to my oncologist during my follow-up routine exam in August. And she took me seriously. Essentially she said it was critical for me to listen to my body and that if I didn't feel something was quite right and that something like pain didn't go away for what should be a reasonable period of time then I should report it. Noone knows my body better than I. I need to stay vigilant. She immediately sent me for a chest x-ray to rule out involvement with the lungs of my cancer. (Remember they have been keeping an eye on lesions / abnormal cellular structures in multiple nodes in my lungs - they have been stable since last March at first diagnosis but definitely need to keep alert of these for any change.)
I had to explain to Victoria why my "routine" visit to the hospital was taking so much longer because I was being sent for tests like a chest x-ray. This began a chain of worry. "Why didn't you tell me that you were feeling pain, Dave?" "Why are you being sent for a chest x-ray?" "What the hell is going on here?".
Within a matter of minutes I went from a routine physical exam in my Oncologist's office to having a chest x-ray in the all-too-familiar Diagnostics Dept. at St. Joseph's Health Centre. Just a few hours later I got a phone call from the Oncology clinic at St. Josephs. Chest x-ray is clear. Nothing to worry about... at least not for most...but the fact that the chest x-ray came back clear didn't negate the fact that I was still experiencing discomfort when I shouldn't be. Or was it all in my mind? Was I imagining this shit?
When I met with my family doctor a few weeks later I reported it to her as well. She listened too. And that afternoon I was sent for another chest x-ray but this time with special instructions to take pictures from the side as well. And she sent me for a nuclear bone scan - a first for me. What a test that was from going to the hospital and being injected with a radioactive substance...leaving for home to "chill" for a couple of hours...only to return and lay in a machine for what seemed like hours listening to the steady hum of the machines in the room. I actually fell asleep in the bone scan machine.
Later that day I got a phone call from my family doctor. (Who has a doctor that calls them at home?!) The chest x-ray and the bone scan were both clear. Breathe, David. No spread of cancer to the bones. No lung metastases. Relax for a bit if you can.
And later that evening when I blew a kiss to my son (you see...with the bone scan I was radioactive to his little body so I couldn't snuggle him, to hold him in my arms and kiss him as I wanted to do. Just to be safe.) I thought to myself that I did the right thing by telling my doctors. I didn't mean to send Victoria into a spiral of worry and anxiety again but I needed to listen to my body. I couldn't help thinking that if I had listened more closely to my body a couple of years ago when I first started having bowel issues that maybe things would be different. Maybe the tumour in my sigmoid colon wouldn't have advanced so far. Maybe it wouldn't have spread its cancerous hell into the regional lymph nodes - forever sending fears that it has spread to other organs remote from the colon. But the stark reality is that we will never know.
I would much rather err on the side of caution now and be overly sensitive to every pain, to every discomfort, to everything in my body that just doesn't quite seem right than to just fluff it off as nothing to worry about...until it is too late to do anything about it.
A shout out to my doctors for listening to me. For not sitting on this. For ruling out the worst. For being in my corner as I continue to fight and battle and kick the crap out of colon cancer.
Thank you, Doctor. You are a very important member of the Kicking the Crap Crew.
Let me catch you up.
Back in the summer I began to notice a pain...more like a dull soreness in the middle of my lower left back. At first I thought it was just related to packing and lifting boxes and furniture in the move out of our condo into a house in June / July. I thought to myself...it's just a pulled muscle. A strain. A soft tissue injury. Or maybe my body is just complaining that I had done some physical activity that it wasn't used to for a loooooonnnnnngggggg time. At least before the diagnosis and surgery.
But the pain didn't go away.
I started thinking to myself "am I imagining this?". Should I tell Victoria? Should I tell my doctors? Surely they will just fluff it off as nothing major..stop worrying about little stuff like a little discomfort in my side. Will my oncologist think I am just being paranoid, am seeking attention? That I need to be sick and for doctors to be examining me, paying attention to every little sore I report in order to feel that I am being watched out for? That I am not being lost? That's ridiculous.
So I decided to report the discomfort to my oncologist during my follow-up routine exam in August. And she took me seriously. Essentially she said it was critical for me to listen to my body and that if I didn't feel something was quite right and that something like pain didn't go away for what should be a reasonable period of time then I should report it. Noone knows my body better than I. I need to stay vigilant. She immediately sent me for a chest x-ray to rule out involvement with the lungs of my cancer. (Remember they have been keeping an eye on lesions / abnormal cellular structures in multiple nodes in my lungs - they have been stable since last March at first diagnosis but definitely need to keep alert of these for any change.)
I had to explain to Victoria why my "routine" visit to the hospital was taking so much longer because I was being sent for tests like a chest x-ray. This began a chain of worry. "Why didn't you tell me that you were feeling pain, Dave?" "Why are you being sent for a chest x-ray?" "What the hell is going on here?".
Within a matter of minutes I went from a routine physical exam in my Oncologist's office to having a chest x-ray in the all-too-familiar Diagnostics Dept. at St. Joseph's Health Centre. Just a few hours later I got a phone call from the Oncology clinic at St. Josephs. Chest x-ray is clear. Nothing to worry about... at least not for most...but the fact that the chest x-ray came back clear didn't negate the fact that I was still experiencing discomfort when I shouldn't be. Or was it all in my mind? Was I imagining this shit?
When I met with my family doctor a few weeks later I reported it to her as well. She listened too. And that afternoon I was sent for another chest x-ray but this time with special instructions to take pictures from the side as well. And she sent me for a nuclear bone scan - a first for me. What a test that was from going to the hospital and being injected with a radioactive substance...leaving for home to "chill" for a couple of hours...only to return and lay in a machine for what seemed like hours listening to the steady hum of the machines in the room. I actually fell asleep in the bone scan machine.
Later that day I got a phone call from my family doctor. (Who has a doctor that calls them at home?!) The chest x-ray and the bone scan were both clear. Breathe, David. No spread of cancer to the bones. No lung metastases. Relax for a bit if you can.
And later that evening when I blew a kiss to my son (you see...with the bone scan I was radioactive to his little body so I couldn't snuggle him, to hold him in my arms and kiss him as I wanted to do. Just to be safe.) I thought to myself that I did the right thing by telling my doctors. I didn't mean to send Victoria into a spiral of worry and anxiety again but I needed to listen to my body. I couldn't help thinking that if I had listened more closely to my body a couple of years ago when I first started having bowel issues that maybe things would be different. Maybe the tumour in my sigmoid colon wouldn't have advanced so far. Maybe it wouldn't have spread its cancerous hell into the regional lymph nodes - forever sending fears that it has spread to other organs remote from the colon. But the stark reality is that we will never know.
I would much rather err on the side of caution now and be overly sensitive to every pain, to every discomfort, to everything in my body that just doesn't quite seem right than to just fluff it off as nothing to worry about...until it is too late to do anything about it.
A shout out to my doctors for listening to me. For not sitting on this. For ruling out the worst. For being in my corner as I continue to fight and battle and kick the crap out of colon cancer.
Thank you, Doctor. You are a very important member of the Kicking the Crap Crew.
