WTF: The Procedure

Once all the prep nonsense (and subsequent fasting--boo!) was out of the way, the procedure itself wasn't any big deal, mainly because I slept through the whole thing. I had actually been looking forward to the rest, how sad is that? My folks had driven out to take care of Little Miss while I was under, so that was one less thing to worry about. I was also really looking forward to eating my face off, Friday night fish fry style, to make up for the last 24 foodless hours.

So, the colonoscopy came and went with me under heavy sedation. Apparently, my recovery from said sedation was a very gradual process, with my waking up every five minutes or so to ask The Saint what time it was. These first few hours are pretty hazy for me, but the doctor that did the procedure poked his head at some point to tell The Saint that he regretfully had to go snake another drain before he could meet with us.

Eventually, a nurse came in and asked us to meet with the doc in another area. A curtain was drawn, which would have set off alarm bells, had I been more sober. We sat down and the grave-faced doc said that they had found a large mass in my rectum. He then told us that there was a 95% chance it was cancer.

The rest of the meeting was pretty much a tear-streaked blur. Something about the next steps being the staging of the cancer, which would be dome via a number of other procedures. They handed us a number of appointment slips with the dates and times of my upcoming CT scan and meeting with a surgeon. They drew blood to test my liver functioning and CEA levels. Then we left.

I don't remember the walk to the parking ramp (I've always tended to lose transitions), but I do remember getting into the car, whereupon The Saint broke down for the first time since we got the news. His crumbling made me fall apart all the more.

It was all so surreal and horrible. I felt numb yet stuffed full of jagged glass. Forget dinner out, any plans we had made beyond that moment were now irrelevant, obliterated by the sucking black hole that had suddenly taken over our lives. All I wanted to do was get home and nurse my baby, try to somehow reclaim a single shred of the normalcy that used to be my life.