Private Investigations
By: Dave Eldergill Ma
Tags: Ct Scan, Cancer, Colonoscopy, Bowel Cancer, Beyourself

The consultant surgeon turns the monitor screen towards me and animatedly points out the various bits of my insides. My CT scan, (virtual colonoscopy) reveals all sorts of pertinent information but how he can decipher these swirling abstract patterns into anything other than a contemporary piece of monochrome art is beyond me. “You have a very interesting abdomen,” he tells me. Interesting turns out to mean a) something that he is very hopeful is not cancer but a large lipoma, a fatty non-malignant tumour that has the potential to occlude my colon and b) an inflamed perforation that he believes may be causing the bleeding and abdominal discomfort.

Most surgeons, it would seem, like to do operations. They relish the blade and the cutting into flesh and he tells me this with what almost appears to be a look of enjoyment on his face. I am therefore relieved and surprised that at this stage he believes we should wait a month, perform another CT scan and see if the hole in my bowel is healing on its own.

This is the process, the waiting and trying to continue with normal life, although normal is a relative term. I am in a strange limbo land where nothing is certain. At one moment I am convinced that I’m on the sure and certain road to an early demise, resigned to being about to shuffle off my “mortal coil.” The next moment, I am upbeat, optimistic and positive that it’s a benign tumour and its removal merely an inconvenience. Because I was once a nurse, the unreasonable random nature of illness, accidents and death shouldn’t surprise me, and yet because I was a nurse I encountered it all the time, although of course always with other people. At the end of a shift I could go home and back to living my life.

This illusion was cracked by the very recent death of my cousin. We shared great fun and friendship as children but as is often the way, became distanced by growing older and living miles apart and we didn’t maintain the same close bond of childhood cousins into adult life. But we still had a sense of those halcyon youthful days when we did meet up. We were born a matter of a few weeks apart, so close together in fact that my mother and her sister chose for us both the same name. I was very sad when my cousin died but also if I am honest, shaken by the reminder of my own mortality. There is nothing like a funeral to focus my mind on the symptoms I was experiencing and then see them in the worst possible light. The order of service from his funeral is still in my car, as although I don’t want to be constantly reminded, I don’t seem able to move it from where it sits as this poignant acknowledgement of the fragile grasp we actually have on life.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

In the meantime, I have to rearrange normal daily routines to accommodate the appointments for blood tests and scans, allow for the time it takes trying to find somewhere to park at the hospital and getting anxious not to be late to see the consultant. My reluctance to discuss what is happening does not change. I have to rearrange clients and give them an excuse that another appointment has come up, and of course some people ask me “is everything alright?” My response is to try to deflect the question. I am not ready to blurt out that “it’s just that the doctors would like to investigate my bloody turds but thanks for asking,” All the while the symptoms are becoming worse. Everything seems normal for a few days and then “shit!” I need the toilet desperately. When I get there, undoing my belt and fly and nearly tripping over my jeans as I rush to sit down, my evacuation turns out to be a bloody, mucous clot. I dare not move, blood clots are like London buses, you wait for ages and then three big red ones come along at once. Added to this I now know what Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Bucket List” meant when he said about getting older, “never trust a fart.”