Are all colon doctors full of energy? Jill and I met with my new colon surgeon today. He brought in a laptop that had a giant poop emoji sticker on the back. Bold choice. But like my new high-energy oncologist, Dr. Lakshmi was equally high energy.
Looks like I will be scheduled for surgery in a couple of weeks. He told me about the 2-4 rule. 2-4 hours of surgery, 2-4 days in the hospital, and 2-4 weeks recovery. Likely I will be out for a short time, then need to work from home for some of the recovery. If only I had had any practical experience working from home, sequestered from human contact and doing on-line meetings. Certainly shouldn't be that hard, right?
In the exam room, there was a diagram of someone's digestive track, pinpointing every single disease that can/does occur. It was useful to see the plumbing, but damn, that person had some serious issues. Kinda put things into perspective. Certainly, my thing is not fantastic, but I don't have withering bowel syndrome, or super nasty carcinoma of the urethra. (That was an actual thing that might have been on the chart - the font was really small).
My first spitfire colon doctor had me thinking they would take out 1/2 my colon. It's closer to 20%. I will be losing my Sigmoid Colon (Freud's medical doctor third cousin). You have your first part, then your second part (sorry if that's too technical), then the Sigmoid Colon, then we head to the exit. I'm just losing that fancy outer room that some swanky bathrooms have, often with attendants and spritz bottles of mouthwash. And when you think of it that way, ewww. Sorry.
But they will take my colon sitting room, stick the other parts back together like PVC pipe, it will all heal, and then I get to go back to just one cancer! I did smart-assedly ask if they used gorilla glue, and he told me they use tiny staples, but then they do actually use some form of glue as well. If you ask a smart-ass question, sometimes you get an answer. Again, ewww.
Dr. L told me they use a "minimally invasive" method, called the DaVinci Code, or Method, or something. I wasn't sure what minimally invasive meant (even after he clearly described it). I thought it included not asking too many hard questions. But no, google tells me it is robot assisted! Awesome. And instead of one big-ass scar, apparently I will have a few, small incisions, around my belly button, on the bottom of my left foot, and if I heard him correctly, on one of the cats. My pick.
So, off to a new adventure. I was going to ponder if I am in the midst of a terrible series of alphabet-named cancers (like hurricanes). Cancer A dissipated in the Atlantic before it could become a Tropical Cancer (likely around the Tropic of Cancer - see what I did there?) So, we started with Brain, then moved on to Colon. I stopped pondering this when I tried to think of a "D". Maybe it's possible and other D body parts exist, but tell me honestly guys, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Yeah, me too. Not funny after that.
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