5 – FU Cancer!

Well it’s been a long time since I’ve been on the blog. I’ve wanted to update everyone for a while now but I just haven’t felt well enough to do it. There’s so much that’s happened in the last month or so that it seems like it has been a year.

Well I had surgery on March 23. The surgery was to remove all of my large intestine and some of my rectum. I was given a temporary ileostomy which will be converted into a j pouch after my chemotherapy. (Yeah I had to look those words up too to see what they were). The surgery went really well and my recovery seemed to be going okay. My main problem that week of recovery was that I wasn’t able to urinate on my own. So after a week at the hospital they sent me home with a catheter. I hate catheters and have way too much experience with them as you’ll see in a bit.

Being at home was nice but I was uncomfortable all the time and missed by hospital that could adjust just the way I liked it. The more food I ate the sicker I felt. Little did I know, my small intestine hadn’t woken up and I was developing a rare case of pancreatitis.

Two days after being home from the hospital I started to get really nauseous and eventually began throwing up many times during the day. Since it was a Saturday, we weren’t able to get a hold of my surgeon so we got the on call doctor. At first he just said to only drink liquids and that it will pass. Well, it didn’t. After 4 attempts he had me sent to the emergency room.

By this time I was in a lot of pain and constantly on the verge of throwing up. I’m getting nauseous just talking about it. They did a CT Scan and said I had a partial blockage in my small intestine and pancreatitis. They sent me in an ambulance back to LDS hospital where I’d just come from two days earlier. The ambulance ride cost $2,500!!!!!!! Just for drive up to Salt Lake! You'd thing we had a party or they gave me a lot of drugs on the way up but nothing, I just laid there watching Megan follow us. It was pretty much the stupidest ambulance ride ever.

The fun began at LDS hospital. They stuck an NG Tube up my nose, down my throat and into my stomach. One of the most uncomfortable things I have every experienced, and by this point, I’ve experienced a lot. The tub gagged you constantly and I continued to throw up. The purpose of the tube was to suck out every thing in my intestines since they were pushing the food down.

I wasn’t allowed to drink or eat anything. I just sat there for three days getting my guts sucked out of me. My blood levels that indicated pancreatitis kept increasing. Since I wasn’t getting better the surgeon decided I couldn’t go much longer without food so they placed a PICC line in my arm. That was a struggle and they had a hard time getting it to work but eventually it did. The pick line is a glorified IV in your arm that goes directly to your heart.

They used the PICC line to give me food through an IV. I didn’t like my PICC. It kept bleeding when it wasn’t supposed so they’d have to change the dressing on it and that hurt! But the PICC was nice too because they could draw blood out of it.

For those of you who haven’t spent a night in the hospital, the little night people (no offense Chad) come around in the middle of the night and wake you up so they can poke your arm and draw your blood. It gets old fast. So the PICC avoided the poke, but not the wake up.

After a few days of the PICC, they pulled out my NG Tube and replaced it with a smaller tube that they fed into my intestine as a feeding tube. Once the feeding tube was placed I was able to start sipping water.

IT WAS AWESOME!!! I loved sipping the cold water. It’s funny how a lot of things I used to take for granted had been taken away from me and wonderful it was to get one of them back.

I began recovering finally and eventually was allowed to eat. As we got closer to getting discharged my urologist gave me two options: have a full time catheter, or I can do what they call “straight cathing” where I would put a catheter in myself to urinate several times a day. The thought of doing that to myself terrified me. I decided I would try it out because it would be nice not to have a full time catheter to carry around. My first time burned like crazy!! I was convinced this was not for me and had the full catheter brought to my room. But then I tried again. Still burned but it wasn’t as bad.

So to this day I am still straight cathing about 4 times a day, hoping that my bladder function returns to normal. It’s starting too I think.

So I was discharged finally, with no tubes to hold me down. I went home and started immediately feeling sick. WHAT THE HECK! If I was going to get sick again why couldn’t it have happened at the hospital. I went on an all liquid diet for a few days and the sickness went away.

That’s my go to treatment now. I’ve felt sick a few times since I’ve been home and I always go to a liquid diet and it eventually goes away.

By this point I had lost 40 lbs. And if you know me, I didn’t look like I had 40 lbs. to lose.

But as of right now I’m feeling much better.

I started chemotherapy yesterday. My treatment is called FOLFOX. One of the drugs I’m on is called 5-FU so I thought it fitting to name this post FU cancer. It’s nice to be fighting this thing finally. We'll see how the side effects go but it’s worth it.

Thanks for all of your support. I know from your end it may seem like it goes unnoticed but from my end I feel all of your thoughts and prayers strengthening me and it really does make a difference. God is there with us even in the hardest of times. He is lifting my burdens and the burdens of my family and part of that is thanks to you.

John 16:33 “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

This is a picture of my first day at chemo treatment. I was by far the youngest person there. Everyone looked at my like "what's he doing here?" I've got a port in my chest which the nurse can access and give me the drugs through it so the drugs go directly to my heart and then my heart blasts the chemo through my body and it kills the cancer. At least that's what it's doing in my mind.