Hello my name is Dave and last year went through what I can only describe as a nightmare scenario. What initially started as a problem with sleeping lapses suddenly catapulted me into a direction I wasn't expecting, visited my GP and told him of my sleep issue and was duely sent to the pathology department of my local hospital for a FBC. It was only when I recieved a call back and asked to re-see my GP that it was found my FBC showed me as being 80.4 haemoglobin .. at this point I had no idea what it meant, but as you can guess things snowballed as an appointment dropped through my door for a perliminary 'soft' scope endoscopy. From there it was found that I had polyps of which the specialist rated them as benign .. I breathed a sigh of relief, but was told that an appointment for a 'top and tail' would be soon ... low and behold 2 weeks later it arrived and I was scared unlike anything I had felt before. It seems I had a discomfort issue during the colonoscopy and it wasn't fully concluded, however the gastroscopy [think it's right?] revealed I have a hiatus hernia !!. Could it get any worse ? .. well to me yes .. I was told I needed to return the following week for another colonoscopy.
Due to the issue during the first colonoscopy they decided to give me a stronger painkiller and larger sedative of which I blacked out at some point, only to find out that multiple polyps was found with a couple in the 4-5 cm range .. but again the colonoscopy wasn't concluded. I was notified that I has been referred to St.Marks hospital and the next stage was to have a general anesthetic colonoscopy .. or so I initially thought .. this happened by the way two weeks ago. I was told that the idea was to have the 2 larger polyps removed and everything would be fine and not to worry ... the specialist and nurses there was awesome in reassuring me. When I came around from the proceedure all I vaguely remember was a hand appearing and a gentle voice saying his name and that tomorrow we'd have a lot to talk about. I think what I wasn't prepared for was the fact that rather than remove the initial problem .. something new had come to light which apparently 'shocked' those involved .. a large tumor was found in my ascending colon just above where the small intestine connects .. I wanted to run away and hide .. and at 50 .. that's no mean feat ... also piled on my now tumor issue is the fact it's closing within the area ... and that 300+ polyps was found from my sigmoid colon and beyond.
Where does this leave me I hear you say ... well this past Monday I've learned that an ememergency CT I had has luckily showed me that it's not spreading .. however the tumor is active and definately not friendly, but localised .. o now I have a new appointment coming next week to meet with a consulting surgeon about a forthcoming operation .. something also has been mentioned about cell level elevation in my blood ... still to shocked and scared to understand it all to be honest ... and there you have my nightmare to date.
