Cancer Update: Post-Surgery
CN: cancer, surgery, hospital stays, weight
Surgery and hospital stay play-by-play below, but the headline update is the surgery was a success! It took two hours longer than expected, because Hubert is was very good at being cancer and tucked himself way up close to my spleen, meaning my surgeon, Dr. Hill, spent much of the extra time protecting my spleen during surgery instead of just slicing and dicing. There’s no cancer left in my colon and we have reason to be hopeful that the lymph nodes are cancer-free too, though we’re still waiting on confirmation on that from pathology. More detail on what comes next at the bottom of the post, but thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who’s poured out support, whether it be financial, material, or emotional/spiritual/thought-or-vibe-based. Surgery and the early days of recovery have gone so much better than I could have ever expected and I know it’s because of the support I’ve received.
I’ve taken a real “cancer is funny” approach to this whole situation, from diagnosis onward. In a way, it’s my act of defiance: I insist on being charming, because cancer is anything but, and I won’t let it take this from me. And it helps that I have cancer of the digestive system, because poop, butts, and farts are inherently funny and I talk SO MUCH about poo right now. I honestly think I wouldn’t have handled this as well if I hadn’t already worked as a nanny. Ten diaper changes in and any shyness I had about bowel movements disappeared.
But most of the humor you can derive from cancer, outside of gluteal material, comes from how strange and stereotypical the experience is. My colon woke up one day and decided to try to kill the rest of me with a rogue colon-growing experiment, and got the experiment to the size of a baby carrot before those meddling doctors foiled the whole thing. That’s weird. This is a weird thing that my body has done. And yet, amongst this weirdness, we have the very typical, very normal social responses to cancer. Nearly everyone, unfortunately, has known someone who’s gotten cancer and we’ve all had to react to that news over and over again. You can picture the SNL skit in your head, a countdown of the Top Ten Responses to Cancer, ranging from, “Oh my god, you’re dying!” to “I hear it’s no worse than the flu.”
Cancer is funny, until it’s not.
On Friday, it wasn’t.
We got to the hospital at nearly exactly the prescribed arrival time of 10:20am, and there was nowhere to park. On our third loop around, my parents nabbed a handicapped space as someone was pulling out and Ian dropped me off at the entrance to go park somewhere that may have been across the Maryland border, judging by the drive time. We went in as a crew and bounced from the welcome desk to the registration desk to the surgery waiting room, and sooner rather than later, the nurses took me back to get changed into a purple hospital gown that inflated with warm air that turned me into an infection-fighting marshmallow. I hadn’t eaten any solid food since Wednesday evening, so mostly, through all of this, I wanted a snack.
Once I had an IV in and was settled in the room, they brought Ian back and I napped through a replay of the NC State game, then switched the channel when they started to play the Carolina-Clemson game, because it took a turn real quick, and we settled on Friends while a different nurse came in with pills and shots. The anesthesiologist started his overview of the surgery with, “Man, it’s been a hell of a year for you, hasn’t it?”, which I appreciated more than words could say, because it has. And then we waited, and we waited, and we waited.
Dr. Hill was finishing up another surgery by the time my surgery was scheduled to start, and almost everyone who came by said that this was because she’s pretty thorough. Dr. Hill herself made an appearance and we talked through, again, what was going to happen during my robot-assisted laparoscopic partial colectomy. They’d put me under, put my arms out to the side (like Jesus on the cross, she did not say, but I thought), and make a few small incisions to get the robot in. They’d survey the entire abdominal cavity, because cancer is gross and not only spreads but can spray cancer mucus all around. Plus, they may as well see if they can identify any other sources of pain, like endometriosis, while they’re in there. No reason to open me up twice. Then they’d remove the cancerous section of my colon, making sure that they could get a clean blood supply on either side of the cut, then staple my colon back together and take out the cancer through a larger incision down by where they do C-sections, on the bottom of my belly. If all went well, they’d remove all the cancer in the colon during the surgery, take out some lymph nodes for biopsy, sew me up, and send me to recovery.
Shortly after that, I waved to Ian as they took me back, and then woke up in a dark room with a nurse telling someone that I was waking up. Whoever it was must have asked how I was doing, because the nurse was describing me to them and I, still in the grips of anesthesia, yelled, “I’m a fucking delight!”
Actually, my breath support has been shot since the surgery so I probably just said this, but it felt like a yell, and the nurse, literal angel that she was, repeated my assertion word-for-word to whoever she was talking to.
I fell asleep again and woke up in my hospital room around 11pm on Friday night, very concerned about the time of day and the weather, which was probably not what anyone else in the room was thinking about.
The surgery, which was supposed to start at 12:20pm, actually started around 3:15pm, a little more than an hour after they took me back for surgery. Do I know how any of this felt? No, I was asleep. But I do know from some group chats that people started getting a little worried once we passed the expected four-hour mark of surgery. And then five. And then six.
Cancer is funny, until it’s not.
In the end, everything was okay. Dr. Hill said I gave her a run for her money, but that I took the surgery like a champ. Hubert was snuggled away up by the spleen and that made things tricky. There was no other cancer in the colon and the reattachment went well. There was no sign of endometriosis, but she did visually confirm that I for sure have polycystic ovary syndrome. I have a couple more cuts than expected, and I was under anesthesia for a long time, but I’m okay. I’m okay. It’s okay.
But it could easily have not been. It could easily have been that the cancer had gone much further than we had seen, that it was hiding so thoroughly that opening me up was like walking into the zombie apocalypse. It could easily have been that my heart misbehaved and my blood pressure tanked and things could have gotten very, very complicated. The news could have been bad and taken the jokes down with it. I survived and remain a fucking delight, but there’s no guarantee that that would have been my story.
I don’t want to move past that, even though I know we all want to. I’m young, I’m relatively healthy, we caught the cancer early enough, it all looks good, but that wasn’t the guaranteed outcome. I’m awash in a sea of luck and blessings and this still could have been bad, because the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike. I have a friend who will never be cancer-free, not for the rest of her life, and she is no less loved than I am. As I’m writing this, I’m listening to updates about a friend’s baby grandchild who was just diagnosed with leukemia, and god knows that baby isn’t any more deserving of sickness than I am.
And while I fully believe that knowing you’re loved and receiving that love in a million ways helps you to withstand the trauma of surgery and to heal more quickly, I want us to be so, so careful with how we think about this outcome. I’m thankful for each doctor, nurse, technician, CNA, housekeeper, food service worker, and transporter who worked with me, and for every thought, vibe, or prayer that was said, and for my parents and Ian and everyone who’s supported them. And. I could have had all the support in the world and still been in the hospital, still sick, with more cancer than surgery could handle.
Love is.
Sickness is.
We have to hold these things together, or risk giving away our compassion less freely than God gives rain.
Goodness, there’s so much more. I want to tell you about Payton, the night nurse from the first night, who was a gem. I want to tell you about the thing with the catheter, because boy, was that an experience. I want to talk about Cynthia, the nurse who worked with no-nonsense patience to teach me to get in and out of bed. I want to talk about the surgical intern, who came into my room like a whirlwind but presented my case right outside my door with precision and detail that showed she had been listening intently when I talked. I want to talk about how smells smell more now and how I’ve learned about muscles I didn’t know I’d been using and how my abdomen looks like I won a tiny knife fight with a robot. I want to talk about some of the bummer stuff too, like the pain and the constant struggle in talking about my weight, and the monster that roared through my stomach for a day but refused to come out. I want to talk about how my arms are still sore and how tired I get and how this is somehow both better and worse than before the surgery. I want to share all these things, but I think this is more than enough for now. I had a six-hour surgery on Friday, I stayed in the hospital until Sunday afternoon, and I’m at home, recovering pretty well. That’s enough.
From here, we have a couple milestones to look out for, that could have good news or bad news.
Pathology from the removed portion of my colon, along with some lymph nodes, will come back this week or next. We’ll get some details about Hubert, but what we’re looking to learn is whether the lymph nodes are cancerous or not. If they are, we’ll talk chemo. If not, we’re done with treatment for the time being.
I have a follow-up appointment with surgical oncology on December 29th where we’ll discuss the pathology and what comes next.
The oncology department resubmitted the paperwork for my chest CT, so that should now be covered by insurance, though I’m still waiting on that bill.
I’ll have follow-up CT scans and another colonoscopy this year to be sure the cancer hasn’t recurred. There was another polyp in my colon that could have developed into a cancerous mass that they removed during my colonoscopy, so it’s important to monitor me for this next year especially.
Recovery should take about six weeks. I can’t lift anything over 10 pounds, I need to be careful about riding in cars and about driving, and I’m on a low-fiber diet until my doctor says I can start bringing the veggies back in. My kingdom for a salad, but all I can see is mac and cheese until the end of time. I can’t drink at all but I would choose ginger ale over beer every time. It’s like I don’t even recognize myself.
Okay, I think that’s it. Sign up for updates below if you want to hear about the pathology and any other follow-up. Thanks to everyone at Winchester Medical Center for my stay—my confidence in your work made all the difference in my pre- and post-surgery nerves and I was cared for so, so well. Thank you, thank you, thank you again to everyone who’s given something to us during this time. My stomach would be churning with anxiety instead of farts without y’all, and Ian and I would be buried under take-out boxes and debt by now. And thanks to my body, which is remembering how to digest like a pro and inching closer to solid poops every day.