The Big C Rears its Ugly Head

After over 7 years of thinking that it couldn't possibly happen again, the impossible happened.  This time, the problem was discovered because I was passing stool through my bladder.  At first, I didn't think anything about it because I thought maybe I wiped wrong or something; but when I wiped when I hadn't had a bowel movement and there was still stool on the paper, I knew something was wrong.  The biggest problem was that I was in China and I didn't have access to an English-speaking doctor.  I asked around at a foreigner's dinner (Christmas Eve of all days!) and there were no real suggestions.  On Christmas day, 2010, I mentioned it to my niece, she put the symptoms into the search engine and it came up right away: vaginal fistula.  Of course we called my boss right away and he got me to the hospital nearby.  They weren't able to do anything there so we went to the main hospital in the city.  We described what we found on the internet and all the doctors laughed and said "impossible".  It turns out that it wasn't a vaginal fistula, but I didn't find that out until later when I was examined in the US.


They ran a few tests that night and decided to have me admitted until they could run all the necessary tests to determine what the problem was.  That hospital stay was really a unique experience for me because it was so different from being in an American hospital.  The first thing was, you had to pay upfront for everything.  Before they would examine me in the emergency room, my boss had to pay a fee, even though my school had required that I purchase insurance at the beginning of the school year.  When they decided that I needed to be admitted, he paid 3000 RMB (a little over $400USD).  Each morning, I received a statement telling me how much of that had already been spent.  On the third day, my statement said that my balance had been used up.  Fortunately, the doctors also told me that I didn't need to be there any more as there was nothing else they could do for me.  They told me that I had colon cancer.  I kept telling them "no way".  I told this to my brother and he talked to doctors in the US and was told that colon cancer was slow growing and that there was no way that it could be that since I was given a clean bill of health before I left the states in August.  Be we decided that the best thing I could do was to return to the states for treatment.  My brother made reservations for me to fly on Jan 2 (two days to prepare).  I made arrangements with my co-teacher to take over my final exams and prepared to leave my job.

I arrived at the airport in St. Louis on January 2 in the evening.  After a 15 hour flight, I just wanted to sleep.  But the first stop that my brother decided to make was at the emergency room at the University Hospital in Columbia, MO.  He had talked to doctors there about my situation while I was still in China.  He was sure they would admit me right away.  After sitting in the exam room for a while, they sent me for a CT scan.  This was a lot more comfortable that the one I had in China a week earlier because the whole building was heated (when they took me from my room for the scan in China, they had to put my winter coat on even though we didn't go outside!).  Once they got the results back from that, they sent me home and set me up to meet someone in the surgery clinic the following week.  They said my condition was not life-threatening and there was no reason for me to go into the hospital.  Since I had no place to go, my brother checked me into the Regency.  I stayed there until I was admitted to the hospital on January 12.  I was only supposed to get a colonoscopy that day, but it turned out that I was all blocked up down there so they admitted me.  As soon as they got me into the room, they put a tube in my nose.  That was in place until after surgery when they figured it would be safe for me to eat again.

I was taken into surgery January 14.  I was told that they were going to take out a portion of my colon and a portion of my bladder in order to fix the fistula and that they would do a colostomy to ally my colon to heal following the procedure.  They also gave me an epidural which would allow me to be relatively pain free.  That was a life saver for me because it was the first time that I was able to walk in the time they wanted me to do so following the surgery and I didn't get pneumonia!  But they told me they couldn't do the repair because they found too much cancer in my colon.  They also found it on my liver and diaphragm.  It was a recurrence of my previous cancer, not a first time occurrence of colon cancer like the doctors in China had led me to believe.

A week after surgery, they had me off the epidural, I no longer had the catheter, I was eating regular food, and physically there was no reason for me to remain in the hospital.  Only problem was I had no place to go, so they kept me there.  It was January 26 when I finally checked out (two weeks after I was admitted) and I checked into the motel where I am still staying.