My most recent post was over a month ago. I hadn’t intended there to be such a gap between that one and this one.
But then, things got crazy.
On Sunday, March 17, 2024, I issued the following post on Mastodon as a way of explaining that I’d be somewhat off the grid, content-creation-wise, for a while:
Life has intruded, as it has a tendency to do on short notice. Will be considerably less active online in at least the near future. Will have more to say about it when time and circumstances allow.
2024-03-17-1405CDT
In this particular case, the intrusion had been an emergency admittance to a local hospital late on Friday, March 15, following weeks of gradually increasing gastrointestinal discomfort. A CT scan revealed that my colon had swollen dramatically — hence the discomfort — because it contained a mass roughly 5.6 centimeters in size.
The next day, surgery confirmed the suspicions of the multiple colorectal specialists who’d seen the scan: the mass was malignant. I had colon cancer.
The good news is that they think they got it all in that operation — i.e., they found no evidence of spread beyond that area — although I’ll still receive some chemotherapy in the near future to make doubly sure. The not-so-good news is that, because the surgery required a temporary ileostomy, I will spend a few months with a sometimes problematic bag attached to my belly.
So, friends, when you reach that point in life where you’re supposed to have regular colonoscopies to catch things like this before they happen, don’t follow my idiotic example and put it off. Get your frickin’ colonoscopy.
One of my go-to excuses for avoiding a colonoscopy had been, “We have no history of colon cancer on either side of my family.”
Well, we do now. Namely, me.
I spent a combined month in the hospital and a rehab facility, and know it will take a while before I regain my full strength.1 And, even when I do, I don’t yet know how much the upcoming chemotherapy will sap my energies.
All of this is to say that, while I’ve returned home to my computing setup (after a frustrating month of being able to view and type everything only on a phone screen), I don’t know how much energy I’ll have to give this and my other usual, nerdy endeavors in the near future. By year’s end, to be sure, I should be past this one way or the other, but my expectations of how I’ll actually get from here to there are greatly lacking in detail as yet. I hope my first office visit to the colorectal surgeon will give me better clarity on that score.
Finally, again — get your frickin’ colonoscopy.
I’m typing this early on my first full morning back home because, oddly enough, I had trouble sleeping in my own bed once again. ↩︎
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