March Madness

I've been in this fight for nearly six years now, actually I was diagnosed with FAP six years ago this week. It was during the March Madness basketball tournament and I remember because I spent six days in the hospital undergoing testing to see just what organs this awful disease had decided to affect and figuring out what steps to take next concerning treatment and prevention of cancer (we didn't know then that it was too late to prevent cancer, I already had developed stage 3 colon cancer). ANYHOW, I watched every bit of the last week of the tournament from my hospital bed. I had been admitted from the emergency room after spend hours and hours there because I knew something was terribly wrong and I would need to be admitted. Thought I'd be smart and skip the step about going to the doc and just go straight to the hospital. BIG MISTAKE but that's another story. It's also why I am not treated at the local hospital anymore, I'd rather travel 3 hours to the medical university. After arriving in the ER at nine o'clock in the morning I was finally admitted to the hospital at midnight, maybe even later, and of course this hours after an ER doc told me if my potassium level dropped another point I would be leaving the hospital with a toe tag. This also an example of why I travel to the medical university.

It was a very weird week. I shared a room with an elderly diabetic African American woman and I so enjoyed it. We watched the Golden Girls on TV. We laughed a lot. This makes a big difference. Her friends laughed too. I'm a big fan of laughter. There were so many tests and x rays for me that week, but after the first test, which was the colonoscopy, we had a name for my disease. Familial Adenomatous Polyposis, FAP. Very rare. Very dramatic. But it explained a lot. The constant anemia, the extreme fatigue. The pain in my gut that I'd had for over a week with no relief. But it also left a hell of a lot of questions. Where'd it come from with no history of it in my family? How would this affect my life? What about my siblings and children? How will we treat this? I'm still working on answers to these questions. Some have been answered. Some answers have changed and some questions have changed. But there is a constant in all the madness. Laughter. Laughter relieves so much of the emotional and physical pain. Laughter keeps me in the present moment, or brings me back to the present moment if needed. Laughter heals my soul. And the best thing is.....laughter is free!!