I
haven’t posted for almost a month. I’ve
been quite busy at work and with other non-cancer related activities. I had an appointment last week with Nina, my
nurse practitioner at Dana Farber, who explained what was happening with the
bowel obstruction and what I might do about it.
The bowel obstruction occurred where the small intestine was resected
during my surgery. The medical term is ileal anastomosis.
She explained that ileal anastomosis is the area where the bowel was
sewn together after the 100 cm was removed.
This area of the bowel is narrower than the rest of my small intestine
because of the fusing together of the two pieces. There could also be some scar
tissue or adhesions. She said that this
was not bowel ischemia or small intestinal bowel overgrowth. The problem is due to the bowel resection
surgery. Nina suggested smaller meals,
soft foods and chewing thoroughly. I
asked about determining when I need to go to the emergency room versus waiting
it out. She said that it is ok to wait for perhaps 4-5 hours at home if I am
not vomiting. I should not eat or drink
anything until it clears. If it hasn’t
cleared in that time, I should go to the emergency room to get intravenous
fluids to avoid dehydration. I asked
about taking fish oil or massaging the abdominal area to help avoid another obstruction.
Nina said that these things have not been proven to help but they won’t do any
harm so go ahead if I want to try it.
The only way to “fix” this is to have another open surgery to resect the
bowel again which will/might cause more scar tissue/adhesions. That definitely does not sound like a good
solution and I would only go that route if it were a life or death
situation. I’m hoping that it doesn’t
happen again.
No Update on NETest
I
have not received my NETest results yet.
I surveyed my fellow New York noids who went with me to get the test and
one of them has received the results.
I’m guessing that they are ready and I will have an update next week
after Nancy Texeira contacts me and sends the test results.
Two Year Anniversary
of Beth’s Adventures with Cancer
This
week is the two year anniversary of this blog.
Last year I hit 10,000 pageviews exactly on my one year anniversary. Now I have close to 60,000 pageviews but I
think some of them are spam. I started
getting spam comments right around the time of the winter Olympics. Many of the spam posts
came from the UK and France, not a usual source of my readers who are mostly US
based. I don’t have a clue as to any Olympic connection. These seem to have
lessened now and I think most viewers are people who are actually reading the
blog.
Since
last year, I had the big bowel resection surgery and have had a rough
recovery. Eight months out from surgery
I am definitely not back to normal. I am
at a new normal with a completely different metabolism and many
gastrointestinal problems. From an
oncological standpoint, I am better with lower tumor markers and less tumor
bulk but my quality of life has taken a big hit. I haven’t decided if I am better off or not.
Interesting Article
in “The Atlantic”
Finally,
there is an interesting article in The
Atlantic magazine called “Cancer Treatment as Comic Book”: “Matt Freedman scrawled the pages of Relatively Indolent but Relentless as
he underwent radiation therapy, with engrossing, surprisingly funny results.” I have not read this book which is a journal
with hand drawn comics about his cancer treatment. It sounds interesting and I could relate to
some of the comics that were in The
Atlantic article. The link to the article is below along with two of the
comics that I liked:
