Had the surgery 2/19 to remove the entire sigmoid colon and all the related lymph nodes.
Was in recovery 2/19 to 2/23 and released to go home!
The biopsy results came in late today and confirmed 0/12 lymph nodes were malignant. That's it! It's clean! No stage 3, no chemo required!
Follow up with the surgeon on 4/1 to talk about where we go from here, my guess is colonoscopies 2x a year for life now since it went from 0 to stage 2 in 6 months.
March is Colon Cancer Awareness Month, wear blue and get checked!
#✅UR:
Not sure when I'll be back modding, I still feel like someone slammed me in the gut with a baseball bat. Cricket bat for our international folks! Maybe another 2-3 weeks.
I still lurk and comment occasionally, just as my health allows!
Edit Bonus - Since my wife had her own medical event this year involving a massive infection, spinal intrusion and below knee amputation, we already hit the out of pocket maximum on our insurance for the year.
Sooo...
Get insurance guys, no, seriously, get insurance.
Hey, glad to hear you're doing better, even though the long term outlook isn't the rosiest. Gastro surgery can be rough, and pain can impede the healing process so make sure to take care of yourself and take it easy.
Do you have family in the area (besides your wife, who you mention is also ill) that you can rely on right now? Not to scare you, but If I remember it took about 6 weeks to three months to recover from the more major gastro surgeries I had (I got complications though). Sigmoidectomy is pretty major. Normal (heh what's that) might be sooner if you got laproscopic but I am a layperson.
Let me know if you need any Ilex or calmoseptine or don't know what they are (you will likely need both as your gut adjusts to its new length)
My pain scale is marred by other things I've had so this really is barely registering. If I peg the 10 at "Spinal Stenosis", so far this is like a 6, currently a 4. I didn't even need the oxy today except to go to sleep.
And yeah, was laparoscopic, so I have 4 small incision sites instead of one giant one like with the open heart surgery.
As far as other gastro problems go, I was pretty screwed up by the statins they put me on for the heart stuff. So being a little more "loose" than normal is nice compared to that:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3291011/
Hopefully the two will balance each other out!