Cancer

My Mom died of cancer. My sister-in-law died of cancer. So have many other of my relatives and friends. My best Facebook friend has been struggling with a very serious case of cancer for a long time. I recently googled how many people get cancer. Google says about 1/2 of the women and 1/3 of the men.

Three years ago, they discovered I had a huge tumor in my lower-right abdomen. They were going to have to take it out to know for sure whether it was cancer. (Turns out it was.) And to take it out, they had to remove one of my kidneys, which was no longer functioning because the tumor had completely enveloped it. The tumor weighed 13 1/2 pounds. They had to cut a pretty big hole in my diaphragm to get it out.

From first discovering that I had a tumor, to the surgery, was just 3 weeks. It was not enough time for me to become really traumatized. But in the three years after the operation I have become traumatized. I have not been the same, physically or mentally, since then.

 

And now my doctor wants me to have a colonoscopy, because my latest annual stool test shows a possibility of cancer. (That's right: you can have an annual stool test instead of a colonoscopy every five years. I have a feeling most men don't know that.)

 

I haven't scheduled the colonoscopy yet. I realize I'm behaving irrationally by not scheduling it. My doctor, my general practitioner, who is very intelligent and extremely competent, and in whom I have a very high level of trust, says she's like to see me have the procedure -- "the dreaded procedure," as they called it on "Seinfeld" -- in the next 6 months. If I don't have the procedure, and if I do have cancer, she says, it could take up to 10 years for other symptoms of the cancer to show.

So if I've seemed sort of grumpy lately, that may have been part of the reason.