from the desk of stinkpot

it’s been a rough couple of days.

thursday morning, i get a call from my gastroenterologist. apparently, my polyp had a pre-cancerous adenoma in it. [bad polyp, bad!] that doubly sucks: 1) i had something with the word “cancer” in me (scary even with the prefix pre-). 2) i’ll have to start getting regular colonoscopies to see if polyps are coming back.

funny though, how his call wasn’t my biggest concern that morning.

instead, i was freaking out over the crazy amount of blood i saw during my morning bowel movement. it was a brilliant red, and it had diffused through all of the water in the bowl — it was perversely beautiful actually, like a sunset on a dusty evening. snap back to reality: i’d never seen so much blood in a toilet bowl before and it freaked the shit out of me.

i called the physician who had removed my polyp. concerned, he assured me he had “cauterized the hell out of” the vascular stalk that my polyp had been detached from. he thought it might have just been old blood finally being pushed out. but, he warned me that if i saw anymore blood … well, that’d be bad.

i decided to try and relax and just wait for my next bowel movement. i went to lab and even met with some collaborators. still, throughout my meeting, i felt that horrible feeling you get when you’ve eaten rotten mexican food and it’s passing straight through you — when the meeting ends, i dart to the bathroom and listen in horror as a prodigious amount of fluid spills out of me. i estimate it’s about 2 cups of blood, based on how long it takes.

i’m blanched (in horror, probably not from blood loss) by the time christina gets me to the ER at mount auburn hospital.

the next 24 hours are tortuous. it takes 7 hours for me to get through patient triage and be assigned a hospital bed. (meanwhile, i’m constantly expunging about 10 ounces of blood an hour.) as if things couldn’t get any worse, a nurse informs me at 1 AM that i’m scheduled for an emergency colonoscopy the next morning. that means i get to drink laxatives again but this time while attached to an IV and bleeding profusely. i’ve had better nights.

thankfully, the colonoscopy seems to go off without a hitch the next day. it seems the seal on the polyp’s stalk had actually held; what happened was that the stalk itself had filled with blood like some heinous over-filled water balloon. and eventually, it had popped.

the gastroenterologist who staunched the bleeding basically removed all of the stalk and sealed off the vasculature near the walls of my colon. i’m told that the risk of bleeding reoccuring is minimal. still, to be safe, my physician insists i spend the next four days in the hospital, under constant monitoring by nurses. to allow my wounds to heal, i’m also kept off of food for 2 days.

this last restriction is especially trying, as i hadn’t really eaten the day before i was admitted to the hospital. thus, i go about 72 hours without food, a fast which makes me painfully aware of how much of tv advertising is food related. bisquick pancakes, dark chocolate keebler brownies, buttery shrimp scampi from red lobster — i make a mental note to consume all immediately upon leaving the hospital. for god sakes, i spent an entire 30 minutes fixated on an infomercial advertising the “heat wave cooker,” which chef ron conclusively proves locks in flavor and allows harmful cholesterol to leak out of whatever fowl or small game you’re basting.

between the bleeding and the fasting, i lost 10 pounds in those 5 days. (that’s a lot when you weigh about as much as an chain-smoking anorexic czech supermodel to begin with.)

what’s really frightening, however, was learning that my hematocrit had dropped by about 30% in the first 24 hours of my bleeding. christina and i had been planning on backpacking in burma next week (to be covered in another blog post) … had my bleeding started only a week or two later, i could have been days from civilization, much less a hospital with a functional colonoscope. yet, the rate at which i would have lost blood meant that within 2 days, i’d be in extremely bad shape. i blurted out to chris this morning, “you know, had we been backpacking in burma, you might have watched me bleed to death.” that shook both of us.

ok ok, that was pretty morbid and a little over-dramatic as well. i’ll just end with some photos i took in the hospital (never too sick for photos!):

[ i had a great view from my room.]

[mom and dad got worried and drove up from new york to visit]:

[ i thought this was really cool -- the doctor should me a photo of my colon and the stalk they had clipped off. it used to be as thin as a pencil -- you can see in the first photo in the upper left that it had swollen up like a big leech. i'd advise scrolling away if you're squeamish ... and looking closely if you're one of my buddies in med school.]

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