Starting at the age of 17 I had this weird gastro problem every few years. I would not be able to keep anything down for over a week every time it happened. I would lose 10lbs in a week. I would go to the doctor and they would tell me it was just a gastro virus and to eat very plain and eventually it would go away. And it always did. This happened every few years until I got really sick in the summer of 2009. It was very strange because I was never one to ever get the flu let alone a cold. But I would always get this gastro problem.
Sometimes it would be diagnosed as severe heart burn and I would be downing pepto like it was water. But it never helped. It was strange because I never really noticed any changes in the bathroom. Once I was diagnosed I was told that it was a level one cancer. Which is kind of like lazy cancer, it moves very slowly. Due to that I believe it was growing so slowly that any changes that may have happened occurred so slowly that I didn’t really notice.
I am not sure that I had colon cancer at the age of seventeen but I do know it was always the same thing. I would have severe stomach pain and vomit constantly for a week. Most of the time it was just bile because I hadn’t eaten anything at all, all week.
Looking back I can see why doctor’s would never guess it was colon cancer. But I wish I could have been more intuitive and have realized I was sick long ago so I wouldn’t be at the stage I am at where it has spread to my liver. But hindsight is 20/20 and all I can do is go forward from here and fight like hell to keep my quality of life at a point I am happy with.
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Did you ever have a CT scan before your diagnosis, besides the one you wrote about in your other post that occured a few months before?
ReplyDeleteI was just wondering because x-rays are a powerful, potent carcinogen. No other carcinogen has direct, unhindered access to your cells' dna the way radiation does. It goes right through your dna and causes it to break and mutate and become cancerous.
One CT scan of your abdomen is equal to 300 or more chest x-rays, that's if your a avg size person. If you're smaller, its about 500 x-rays.
That's a HUGE amount of radiation. A CT scan gives you an absorbed dose of 25 mGy. That puts you in the dose range of many Hiroshima survivors who had an increased risk in cancer.
I hope you make it through. My grandpa is battling leukemia right now. I hope they would find a cure soon.