Well, so this is it. My surgery got confirmed yesterday, June 18th. I wasn’t sure it would be approved but here we are. I may even have the surgery sooner than initially planned – if possible. June 26, Friday, has been my set surgery date for a little bit now. It may be pushed up to Wednesday, but we’ll see. I wanted to write this update since it might be the last I write up for a while as I recover. I doubt many will even read this at all but I hope for those that do – send me well wishes and luck. I’ll need it. The surgery, distal pancreatectomy and splenectomy or more simply called, pancreaticosplenectomy, averages 4-6 hours. Good luck pronouncing that, BTW.
I’m not even nervous about the surgery. I’m nervous about the recovery. I’m the type to tough out pain as long as it built up but… this? This will probably be something akin to being ran over by a truck. I already hurt all over… but this will be worse. I know it will be a 10/10 burn, sting, ache… and hell, itch, eventually. I’m also nervous about having a drain tube… that I could have as long as 6 weeks as I recover.
In the long run, this is all for the best. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself. It’s not cancer now – yet to be confirmed by dissection of the cyst removal – but it will be… eventually. If it comes back cancerous after the surgery, I’ll need chemo. I can’t even imagine chemo. If I could tell my kid-self this, she’d believe it. I was sick so much of my childhood that it’s a wonder I wasn’t ever diagnosed with some more ailments/diseases then. I’ve never been the epitome of health. I had fainting spells, potentially epileptic seizures, and plenty of ICU stays.
The symptoms I still have as an adult were ones that plagued me even as a kid. Allergies, it seemed, to almost everything. Unable to tolerate foods at random. In middle school, I developed digestion issues that were swept under the broad scope of GERD and a potential diary intolerance as I aged into high school. I never got real answers, just pulled-from-a-hat assumptions that were never documented as actual diagnoses. I’ve learned that now that I’m an adult too… things I was told and ‘diagnosed’ with as a child don’t show up on my medical records. There’s no record of the presumed seizure(s) I had either. No record of the hospital stay where I was in excruciating pain in my lower left side. They assumed appendix, gallbladder, and stomach issues then. I think I was 9. Although the record of my hospital stay is no where to be seen, my MRI results from that time remains – where they saw that I had a dermoid cyst against an ovary. My pain was real, and after several days in the hospital, they told my parents they found nothing. I had a psych evaluation… at 9… because of a physical pain I was having. It was the cyst all the while pressing into my left ovary and no one told me or my parents about it then. I wasn’t told about it until I was 25 when my OB/GYN pointed it out on a routine scan.
Where was I going with this….
Right.
The US medical system needs to change. And I don’t mean minor insignificant changes over the course of years… decades… a century – where eventually there’s some major change by all the minor changes building up over time. I mean major changes now. As soon as possible, at least within the next decade.
I was luckier than some. I found a GI who took me seriously and did a ton of testing and scans to find the root of my pain. While my pain may not be only pancreatic – if I’d found that cyst any later (like later this year or next year), I’d be telling a different story. One with cancer more broadly and boldly affecting not just my pancreas by that point but my spleen and potentially my entire lymphatic system.
With the surgery ball finally rolling… It’s only up from here, right?
Tags: health