I missed posting yesterday because I spent most of the day at the hospital. We arrived at around 10 am and did registration at admissions, which was quick—surprisingly so. As usually there’s a huge queue at most hospitals here in Quebec City.

The speedy registration meant we were 30 minutes early for my first appointment. Not that I should have worried, as soon as we turned up and handed in my paperwork, I was seen by the nurse for the first round of tests.

Now, not to upset those of you with delicate constitutions, they drew five (5) vials of blood. Stuck not one, but two different swabs up either side of my nose and then …

Asked me to pee in a damn beaker the size of a thimble. Worse … if there is something worse than hovering over the toilet trying to direct a stream of pee into a tiny cup all without wetting your hands, the toilet seat, and other bodily parts, then I was about to be introduced to it.

I had to manually do not one but two (2) butt swabs. Yes, dear gentle reader, you read right. Two butt swabs. I won’t elaborate further.

Oh the joys of pre-op tests.

To be honest, after all that acrobating done in the confined space of the toilet adjacent to a busy room full of people trying to ignore all the needles and blood, all I wanted to do was go have a long, hot, bath!

The next appointment was comparatively sedentary after all that. We made our way across the corridor to get an ECG, in which all I had to do was lie on a cold table, let the nurse attach electrodes to me and run her machine. The attaching and detaching of the electrodes took longer than the actual 30 seconds of the ECG itself. But oh, look, another piece of paper was added to my folder. It was growing exponentially.

At this point it was 11:30 and my next appointment with the internal medicine specialist wasn’t till 1pm, we decided to hoof it off out the hospital, across the street, to a perfectly placed fast food joint and coffee shop doing sandwiches, and had an early lunch.

The afternoon session was pleasantly sedentary with the nurse on my case, Stephanie, taking my weight, blood pressure, sugar and height. All duly noted we sat for 15 minutes in the waiting room till we met the resident to the Internal Medicine specialist. A nice, eager young doctor who didn’t look old enough to be practising medicine.

What followed was almost 45 minutes of discussing the result of the day, filling out yet more paperwork, and consent forms, and discussing the surgery itself. At the end of the session he let slip (as I’m sure he wasn’t supposed to tell us) that my Op date was, provisionally, August 25th. A Monday.

Whisking us out of his office with an ever growing file, he guided us back to Stephanie, who then went through yet more paperwork with us, mostly to do with the day before the op and the day of the op and the things that I needed to not only do, but what would happen upon arrival at the hospital.

We both left the hospital with brain fog trying to digest all the information, not least of which the stuff I have to do at home the night before and the morning of the operation.

But, dear reader, I’ll leave that story for tomorrow. Thanks for reading this far.

𖡼.𖤣𖥧𖡼.𖤣𖥧

I feel like I’ve been away for months, though in fact it’s not been a month, not yet … but there’s been a really good reason for my absence. My health.

To summarise, as a lot of you already know, the OH and I went on holiday to Montreal for a short week away to play tourist there and see the sights. Especially two places I’ve wanted to go for ages, the Bio Dome and the Botanical Gardens. Both of which I did manage to get to see.

Unfortunately, the week didn’t unfold how we had hoped or planned for—we’d booked tickets for certain attractions, a couple of which we had to miss. The upshot, I had been feeling off the weekend before Montreal. But still, we went on the Sunday, traveled in style by train no less. But, that evening I had dizzy spells and terrible, and I mean terrible cramps in both legs.

The thing is, we got off an air-con train and stepped out into 42+ degrees, and both dressed for the cool of the train, so were sweating like the proverbial pig in a blanket. We put my episode down to dehydration and the awful heat. Things didn’t improve and, by Wednesday afternoon I was in a near state of collapse.

Of course the OH didn’t wait a minute more and called for an ambulance. The upshot, I was suffering from acute anaemia and my sodium levels were dangerously low. These two things signalled a red flag to the ER doctor who order a whole battery of tests, including me staying overnight and talk of iron transfusions. They gave me a CT scan Thursday and, that’s when a gastro specialist was called in.

I was scheduled for a colonoscopy and and endoscopy Friday afternoon because the doctor had seen something he didn’t like on my x-rays and subsequent CT scan.

Sure enough, confirmation was made late Friday afternoon, he told me he had discovered a small growth on my lower colon. I have cancer. Operable at this stage with possible follow up treatment. But, operable nonetheless.

If I hadn’t have gone to Montreal, if I hadn’t been seen by this gastro specialist who squeezed me in, my future may have been very bleak indeed. As it turns out, I am looking at what happened with the view I was gifted a silver lining, and my cancer has been found in the very early stages.

It took a further several days to stabilise me in the hospital, plus 3 iron infusions, in which time I got to know the nurses by name.

I’ve been home a while now trying to process all what’s happened and continues to happen what with visits to see various doctors and specialists while waiting for surgery.

All in all, I’ve been the luckiest person I know right now and know what comes next is no walk in the park, but still, I choose to look at this from a positive side of the fence and try to remain focused and positive on getting through this one day at a time.

I hope to share part of my journey with you and hope to that I don’t bore the hell out of you talking about catheters, blood-work, and red cell counts or just how many damn pills I take for breakfast (note: a lot!)

Now, I wonder if I can persuade the surgeon to take a photo of the slice of colon they’re about to chop out of me? No? Okay, maybe not …