How did we get here? (part 2)
Those days were anxious, but at least they were few. While waiting on those results, I had goals from my nurses & docs. The first was to work towards advancing my diet from clear liquids to any liquids to finally solid foods. This just meant letting my body absorb the nutrients it was being given, and waiting. I needed to go a certain amount of time without any nausea so that we knew digestion was occurring.
Moving and walking around was encouraged in a gentle & easy fashion to recover strength. I didn’t want to overdo it since I was still heavily bandaged, but to the surprise of everyone I was out of bed and moving around the room and up & down the hall the very next day. It was a simple conversation with that same conscience from the previous Friday (telling me that something is wrong) as well as actually talking about it with Leah. “Go slow. Call it off if it’s excruciatingly painful, but try to work through a little bit of the discomfort. Again, go as slow as needed and be patient for the healing.” It took until the end of the week to get out of bed or up & down out of a chair on my own, but I got there.
My last goal was to “reduce level of pain” until it was manageable for me to be discharged. Like the diet, there wasn’t much I could do on my end for this except to be honest about how much pain I was in (they had some good stuff) and be patient for the healing process. Sure enough, towards the end of my stay the pain level I reported was zero. Soreness would set in later, but was expected and they gave me some meds for that too.
I was working on these goals when Thursday 4/17 rolled around and by that point we were really ready for answers. It took an extra day/day-and-a-half but at this point I forgot why. I actually read the results from the app on my phone called MyChart that my provider network uses.
Just a quick side note about MyChart, if you’re not familiar with it, it was actually a pretty great app for me. I could see upcoming appointments, do an e-check in for them to save time at the registration desk, schedule upcoming appointments, ask a real human about any issues I had, check prescriptions and see about refills, and see any lab results posted instantly. HOWEVER… the thing about that is…. I saw the results from the biopsy that day before the doctor came by for the daily visit and check in. I read through them, and through the medical terminology I was able to decipher that I did, in fact have metastatic carcinoma.
I learned that I have cancer from an app. Believe me, while it was good to have the access to the results as soon as my providers do, there was nobody there for the next couple of hours to explain exactly how bad it was or just how far along. That ranks right up there with the other worst parts of that week. The time between when we “knew” but didn’t have any further details until the time the docs arrived to tell us about it were the most emotional for us, as I’m sure you can imagine. 0/10 do not recommend learning you have cancer from lab results posted on an app without someone there at the time. If you have the option, don’t read them until your doctor can be in the room. To give them credit, they had read the results too and were prepared when they arrived. They came as soon as they could and I know & respect that they are busy folks as well. I think the logistics of the timing could have been better. Although, I think there’s some irony when talking about timing in all of this.
So that brings things up to the end of the hospital stay. I met my goals of essentially “take it easy and heal, let us monitor you for a week or so, and tell us if anything’s wrong.” I learned that I have stage 3 cancer (we didn’t learn about stage 4 until later) and we had a hell of a battle ahead. I remember telling Leah at the time that this is so incredibly unfair to her. Her dad died of colon cancer in 2016, and here I am with the same damn thing. She responded with the same sentiment, and that this is also unfair to me because I’m 34 and that nobody deserves this, especially me. I walked out of that hospital the same way I went in, on my own two damn feet and with Leah supporting me every step of the way. I would not be alive without her.