Rob's Health: the neverending saga!

So, this has been a very long time in the making, and it will quickly become apparent why it has taken me so long to put together.

To put it quickly, I’ve been in the hospital.

First, let’s try to piece together the beginning. Around 3/17, I started feeling what I thought were the beginnings of another bout of prostatitis, where the symptoms were a slightly pinched urine stream, but pretty bad stomach pain. The doctor treated me as before, with ciproflaxacin, and I went on. The strange thing was, everything seemed to be getting better BUT the stomach pain. That Saturday morning the 21st, I decided to go to a local clinic called CareNow to see what they thought. After some testing, the doctor there decided that it was merely that there was still a lot of stool left, so she suggested Miralax and a stool softener to get cleaned out.

By Sunday night, I still didn’t feel right. I went and bought Fleet, an enema, just to see if I could get some relief. In the lower half, sure, it felt better, but the pressure had been building since 3/17 around my waistline, and the enema still didn’t touch it. I waited another day, but Monday night, the 24th, my heart rate jumped into the 130s, and I decided to go to the ER.

Keep in mind, April left on 3/21 for her longest trip away we’d ever been apart – 2 weeks in Hong Kong and Singapore. It took her about 30 hours to get there.

At the ER, they did a catscan, and the Dr. told me, without question that this mass he’s seeing is colon cancer.

What? This can’t be.

He tells me that I need to call me wife, my parents, everyone, right now. The nurse that had been helping me throughout the night disagreed – you don’t know which hospital you’ll be in, yet. Wait a few hours until around 7:30 and then start making calls.

I’m about to start making calls, and April FaceTime’s me from Hong Kong. It’s literally, hi, honey WHERE ARE YOU? I tell her the story, and she’s crying, and I’m crying, and I say that at this point, I’m going to start calling everybody, my parents, her parents.

When it comes to the doctors, their plan was to do a sort of half-colonoscopy to find out what was going on, and be ready to take out anything needed. Their initial findings were that there was NO cancer (thank Christ!), but here were some things they needed a closer look at, so they scheduled a full colonoscopy for 3/26, which meant that they needed to completely clean me out using (!) Miralax and Fleet.

All of this culminated in my colon actually rupturing of 3/27. My friends, no words can describe. I felt like I was blowing up from the inside. They took 16″ of my colon on the left side, 6″ from the bottom, and surrounding lymph nodes. They sealed everything WITHOUT using a colostomy bag, which would be customary procedure here, because, well, they suck, and they thought that my relatively young age would negate the need. The main cause is that I actually had some diverticulitis-type collections of walled-off colon that was, probably over the last few years, getting infected. This was just the zenith of all of the problems coming together at the right time.

Recovery time! So on 3/28, they’ve got me connected to what’s called an NG Tube, which is a tube fed down into my stomach to prevent nausea and vomiting. No drinking, no eating, just sitting. Of course, through all of this, they’re taking blood, giving me IV antibiotics, all that stuff.
3/29, the NG Tube comes out! Water? Eating? Nope, I can chew gum. Okay. So I chew gum all day. I’ve already made up my mind that going hungry is nothing to the thirst.

3/30, my birthday! I’m cleared for clear liquids! Heck yeah, chicken broth, jello, water, I’m in ecstacy. Seriously, you have no idea how good this is.

3/31, upgraded to FULL MEALs. I’m eating regular people food, folks. Only thing is, I’m still kinda uncomfortable. Swelling, White Blood Cell counts too high…more scans then…

4/1 immediate emergency surgery planned. There are still abscesses that are not going away. Unfortunately, a colostomy bag has to be installed. Removed another 10 inches of my colon on the right and 5 more on the left.

Recovery goes the same for the next few days, NG Tube, no water, then water, then food. All the while, I’m still getting stronger and ready to get the hell out of here. April gets back from Singapore and lights a fire under me. Various CT scans, blood tests, blood cultures, whatever they can think of to try and pinpoint all of the issues. Some of these tests (like the cultures) take longer to come back because of the way the bacteria is produced.

4/7, call April to have her bring me some tacos for dinner. Mmm, tacos. Nurse walks in while I’m chilling and gives me the bad news. We’re gonna have to do ANOTHER surgery. Every emotion possible was going through. I mean, I felt pretty damn good! Why was this happening? Well, it turns out, because of the way the first surgery was done, there were pockets of walled off colon in order to try to save as much of the colon as possible. The blood cultures had come back with this information. My entire colon has been removed, the entire cavity cleaned of all of the pockets of infections. The harshest surgery, about 7 hours under anesthesia, and I came out of it feeling like I’ve been run over by a dump truck.

So, today’s the 11th, and it’s the best I’ve felt since I’ve been here. The lingering, weird gas problems and “catches” in my back are gone. There’s just the dull ache of my body slowly recovering in the darkness, beyond the endless, dreamless, sleepless nights of pain, the actual watching of a clock for hours upon hours, the hallucinations of strange other-worldly biological shapes to the heavily industrial-looking (almost Terminator like) shapes. I mean, you name it, I’ve been seeing it.

What’s strange is that – I’m becoming sort of legendary sitting here. People out of the blue have been stopping my Dad and asking me how I am. The other night, one of the nurses asked me, “Do you remember me asking you if you knew were you were, and you said you had felt a little beat-up?” I had to stop for a second and think, but yeah, I remember that. She said, “I immediately came over to give you more pain medication. You never complain, you’re always trying to smile, you’re always trying to make OUR jobs easier, when it’s you who’s needing our help.” One of the CT scanners came up special to my room to see how I was doing. A group of the anesthesiologists got me a gift basket and came to visit. Apparently, through all of this bullshit, I’m an inspiration. My dad has been making a list. There’s like a group of like 15 people he’s putting together that we’re going to try and recognize. I’ve never been in a hospital before, but this has seriously been one of the most amazing experiences of my life.
I’m gonna be coming out of this with no colon, I’ll be pooping into a colostomy bag, with the hopes that when I heal completely (in 3 to 6 months), they can reverse it and I can be like a normal human again. It’ll mean another surgery, sure, but a surgery free of constant infection around every turn.

More than anything, though, this has made me realize how much time I’ve wasted, how much I’ve taken for granted, how much my family means to me, and how much more life I’ve got.