To bring you up to speed: I feel a gazillion times better than I did. Maybe even a gazillion and one.
I'm not sure if I had just gotten used to torture or what, but that second surgery was easy-breezy. I didn't have much pain and my recovery went quickly. I was working from home in two weeks and back to the office in three. Piece of cake.
But then I started having a few complications... bed rest... complications... bed rest.... I felt like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day except that the only thing I was reporting was annoyance. I was ready to get my life back.
And just when I accepted that I would never feel normal again, BAM, normalcy. Yay!
But unfortunately, normalcy for me is like a Caribbean vacation for someone else. You know how you go from working, doing laundry, cooking casseroles... to TEN WHOLE DAYS of sun bathing, book reading and eating foods like the calories don't count... then back to the grind of your every day? You call that ten-days of bliss "vacation" and you call the other 355 days "normal", right?
Well, mine are all jacked up. Because when I got a time of "normal", it felt like a "vacation", and it only lasted for about ten days. I can't imagine how good ten days in the Caribbean would actually feel.
Food's been giving me the whole, "I'm sorry. It's not you; It's me" talk for weeks now, but I'm still crying to my girlfriends at the Varsity football game and writing all my feelings in my diary. It's a mess.
As you might remember, I started having trouble with digestion before I knew that I had cancer but probably did. My symptoms completely disappeared for a while, but then again, I was barely eating and taking a lot of pain killers, so there's that. Maybe I just didn't notice.
But now, the symptoms are back with a vengeance. You'd think that I would have lost weight because of it, but instead, I've actually gained weight. I'm the only person who has gotten fatter from cancer and digestion problems. Seriously. I can't catch a break anywhere.
A good friend of mine is celebrating three years in remission from Stage 1b-2 lung cancer. She had multiple surgeries and chemo. She's a young mother of four and she's one of the toughest people I know. I mentioned that I was having some "digestion problems" to her last week and she described all my symptoms to a T because that's exactly what happened to her when she had cancer.
As it turns out, she was extremely mineral deficient from her body fighting cancer... in minerals that your basic Woman's One A Day vitamin doesn't include. She worked with a biomedical doctor, started a supplement regiment, and then she and food were back together in no time flat! So now, I've added "biomedical testing" to the To Do List as well.
I understand where the doctors are coming from. Every time I sneeze, they've got to make sure that cancer didn't spread to my sinuses. And please don't get me wrong, I appreciate the caution, but it makes me worry when I'd really like to stop worrying for a change.
I'll be having all kinds of gross and invasive tests on Wednesday and Thursday - a colonoscopy included. I usually try to talk around the word "colonoscopy" because it's so embarrassing, so I decided just to type it here and get it over with. I started this blog about a year and a half ago, and since then, I've had multiple health issues that have caused me to overshare about embarrassing procedures and private parts. If this isn't karma, I don't know what is. And karma hates bloggers. WRITE THAT ONE DOWN.
In related news, my gastroenterologist is about my age and handsome. Shouldn't that be illegal? It feels kind of like date rape. Listen, if at least three people on this earth don't refer to you as "Paw Paw", then you're too young to perform my colonoscopy. He looks exactly like Aladdin, so on a scale of 1 to 10, what are the odds of me singing "A Whole New World" while doped up on anesthesia? I'm going with an 11.
I'm sure everything is fine and I've just developed an adult-onset gluten allergy or something equally as fashionable, or maybe it's a mineral deficiency like my friend, but I would appreciate a prayer or two this week if you're willing. Oh, and clear liquids. Lots of clear liquids.
Are we Facebook friends yet? Let's complete the social media circle, whaddaya say?
