treat a patient they’d not known of four hours earlier.
I was consumed by the discomfort and nausea, trying hard not to throw up because I had been told that if I did, a tube would be stuck down my nose and into my stomach to suck my stomach’s contents out, and I did not want that to happen. So all I could focus on were those parts of the conversation that dealt with the stent procedure and surgery; those were the only things that would give me physical relief.
But my husband was already thinking beyond that; he was thinking about the cancer itself and the future. I barely registered Josh’s questions to Dr. D.C. about whether he’d seen any evidence of metastases to other organs in the CT images we had brought from Garfield Medical Center. No, Dr. D.C. said. They wouldn’t know for sure until they went in, but he would guess I was probably Stage II or III. I was impatient at this line of conversation because all I wanted to do was get to the surgery, and that meant these men had to stop talking about cancer spread and staging and future treatments and if this and if that; none of that mattered right now; right now, I needed something to be done to relieve the nausea and pain.
Finally, Dr. D.C. left. Dr. O. presented me with some consent forms and told me about the risks of surgery, including something about the possibility that my bowels could not be put back in my body, in which case I would have an ostomy or colostomy or some other words that ended with “omy,” and I nodded like I understood, even though I had no idea what he was talking about, and quickly signed the forms. Now I know what all of those words mean, but it was better that I didn’t know back then. Soon, a cheerful Russian man in a green shirt came to wheel me to the procedure room. He was so happy, like everyone at that hospital, that I was convinced UCLA must pay its staff really well.
The stent was successfully placed that evening. When I woke from the hour-long procedure, I could feel the difference immediately. The release of pressure and pain was glorious. Sleep was elusive that night as I constantly and happily jumped out of bed and ran to the bathroom, dragging my IV pole behind me. Josh didn’t sleep much that night, either, partly because of my frequent bathroom trips and partly because the recliner that would be his bed for the next few nights was not so comfortable. He told me how he would never have thought when we got married nearly six years earlier that he would be so happy to hear me pooping not five feet away from him. I had to laugh.
By morning, my stomach had returned to its usual size and softness, and I was feeling completely normal again, stretching and doing yoga poses, like I could run a mile or two or three—after all, up until I became symptomatic, a month earlier, I had probably been in the best shape of my life. Josh noted how my skin had its old glow again; only with the return of the old glow did we realize, though, how waxy and gray my face had grown over the last couple weeks, a visible yet unrecognized sign of the toxic waste trapped inside, poisoning my body. With the return of bowel function and the accompanying sense of normalcy, it was hard to imagine that there was a raging, murderous tumor inside me. But there was. That morning, without the official biopsy results from the colonoscopy back yet, Dr. D.C. came to tell us that my CEA was 53, whereas a normal CEA is less than 5. If there had been any part of us that had hoped I did not have cancer, that hope was completely erased by this news.
My surgery took place the next afternoon, on Wednesday, July 10. It was supposed to take two and a half hours but ended up taking four. Dr. D.C. would discover that my colon had grown to the size of a football and was already beginning to rupture, that in fact the unnaturally swollen part of my colon had pressed itself against my stomach in an attempt to keep itself intact; he marveled that my body had been able to adapt and hold my colon together, for a rupture