You Can't Always Get What You Want....

This past Thursday I went in to my doctor for a routine post-op appointment.  What started as a pretty routine surgery ended up being a procedure more exploratory in nature.

While the surgeon was in there, he found that one of my fallopian tubes was evidently not "tied." Flashback ---to when I had my son almost 7 year ago, I opted to get my tubes tied.  Of course, they don't "tie" anything anymore.... or cauterize for that matter.  Dr. Z placed tiny plastic clips on my fallopian tubes after the c-section.  Coincidently, I remember by husband at the time joking with the OB about accidentally leaving a tube available.  Perhaps there is more to that statement than I realized at the time.

Secondly, the surgeon showed me photos of my swollen appendix.  As it looked abnormal, it is routine to remove it. After my surgery, the pathology report came back reading that my appendix was cancerous.  Granted, it is a low grade cancer and it has been removed; however, the report shows that there are still cancer cells in my colon at the site where my appendix was removed.

Cancer. It's an ominous term to hear, especially when I'm still holding onto my late thirties.  I am pretty confident in my ability to take care of myself: working out, eating healthy, and being relatively stress-free.  Cancer of the appendix is, in my mind, by far the best type of cancer to have.  I don't need an appendix. But just as I was beginning to heal from laparoscopic surgery -- the swelling, the pain medication, the discomfort and bloating, I've now been told that I have cancer.

I expected to go in for this routine appointment and come out with a clean bill of health.  You can't always get what you want.

I thankfully got an appointment early the next day with a colon/rectal surgeon.  In the medical world, a next day appointment is an anomaly.  The appointment also meant I had to get up and give myself two saline enemas, two hours before my early morning appointment, but the discomfort was well worth it.   Dr. M, my colon doctor, has determined that I must have surgery to remove less than a foot of my colon (which includes any lymph nodes that may be affected in that area).  My colon will then be reattached to my small intestine.

Though a date has yet to be scheduled and confirmed, I am assuming the surgery will take place in August.  She told me that we cannot do surgery right now because I am still healing from when they took out my appendix and that area probably still has a lot of inflammation.
When it happens, the procedure will be done laparoscopically.  Afterward, I'll stay hospitalized for 4 or 5 days to make sure there's no issues or infections.  One of the risks is that there's a chance that my bowels could possibly leak into my body at the site of reattachment.  It's important that I am where I need to be in the off chance that happens.  Full recovery will happen after 4-6 weeks of rest.

Of course I was completely shocked by the news, but realized, that without going in for surgery, I could've never caught this so early.  Over time, the low grade cancer would've seeped further into my colon and wreaked even more havoc.

The Stones sung it best, "You can't always get what you want...... But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need."