February 2, 2024. Jason has cancer. Part 2.
I didn’t sleep much the night of February 1st. My world had been flipped upside down entirely. Jason was schedule for surgery at 11am the next day, February 2nd. I remember laying in the bed at my parents house, it being 4am, wide awake. My whole body felt out of sorts. I felt sick to my stomach. Anxiety was racing through me. Just waiting to leave for the hospital to see Jason again. Last I had left him at the hospital he had still be in the ER, so that morning we were meeting him in his room. Entering the hospital through an entirely different process. Which, if you have been in and out of hospitals, you know really is an entirely different reality. The ER feels a bit like a prison. The security, the scanners. The main hospital is so “open” you come and you go. The hospital was about 45 minutes from my parent’s house and south of our home by about 30 mins. It is just where Jason ended up due to the nature of where the GI doctor who had done the scan was located, and then where she told him to go. We have a hospital north of us, only about 5 minutes up the street, that is a sister hospital to the one Jason was at. There always was a slight annoyance and frustration around the inconvenience of everything being an emergency, that we just seemed to end up where we ended up for the first 6+ months. I recall that morning not being able to eat anything, I had barely put down any dinner the night before. I made a coffee in a mug for the road, but didn’t take more than a few sips. The plan was that my mom and I would go to the hospital to be with Jason, and wait for Jason while he was in surgery. My dad offered to stay back home with the dogs. The surgery was no joke of a surgery, was it the longest surgery that the world has ever seen. No. But it was planned to take about 4+ hours. And when it is your person in that room, in “emergency” surgery, less than 24 hours after being diagnosed with cancer. That feels like an eternity.
I remember stopping at our house on the way to get Jason a bag of clothes, and other necessities. I think through Jason’s cancer journey we lost many of phone chargers in hospital rooms. Sadly, over time I would get more accustom to packing a bag for him. I remember getting to the hospital room and being so relieved to see him. I think the craziest thing about it was that he felt so normal. He was my Jason. My fiancé (at the time), happy, bubbly, in pain, but rather calm and cool and collective. Probably a combination of finally some relief from much needed pain medicine and also just who he was. I truthfully don’t think he was overly concerned about the surgery that morning. I think he was relieved. Ready to get to a space of feeling much better. Even though my mind is racing, cancer. Thinking the worst. At this point in time, the only conversation was let’s get this out of your body and save you! Aside from it being cancer, it was also a bowel obstruction, that if left for much longer could’ve killed Jason. It literally would’ve killed him if he had not gone in, who knows in what time that would’ve been. But this was no joke of a discovery. It was an emergency, in a sense. Not the same as life or death the moment they saw the scan and rushed him into the ER, but enough of one to get him on the books the very next morning. This type of rush, emergency, panic. It will be the story of Jason’s cancer journey. Some people experience cancer in a rather slow, drawn out fashion. But not us. The nature of Jason’s cancer was aggressive, changing rapidly. Leading to changes within days or weeks. But I knew none of this at the time. That morning was the first step, to getting Jason back to “normal”.
I remember the nurse, as the team came in to roll him down to surgery, she patted me and said, it’s going to be ok, we are going to take good care of him. She could see the fear in my eyes. Her response was genuine, and truly what she thought would be true. It was true. I don’t think that anyone in that room, necessarily, was imaging this young, otherwise healthy man, to be dead 18 months later.
We learned that Jason’s surgery would be done by a women named Dr. Wiebe. Jason was happy it was a woman. He said they are more attentive, and focused. Statistically speaking, woman surgeons do have patients with better outcomes. No shade to the men in this world. I remember sitting back there in the pre-opp space with him and my mom. He asked my mom to stay with us. He loved her so much. So many times he kept saying thank you for being here. That is who Jason always was. Appreciative when people showed up. Though, I would always fire back, where else in the world would I be right now? Because seriously, where else would I be? I don’t need to dive deep into it all, but Jason’s parents were not there. They asked my mom many times the night before if they should come out. Which to that we would always tell them they needed to make those decisions themselves. Jason, though, he told them not to come. He did not want them there. To be honest, I think this was one of the few times he said that and he meant it. He really did not want them there. He wanted to be in and out, get this over with, and back to home, and “normal”. I can’t relate to that at all. I can’t imagine directly telling my parents not to come after finding out I had cancer, and was going into major surgery. But I think that boundary he set, says everything it needs to about their relationship. My mom, was a God send, She promised to help keep them in the loop and the know.
I remember sitting back in the pre-opp space and the Anaesthesiologist came in to do his general overview. He had the most piercing blue eyes and blonde hair. I remember this because Jason told him that. Ha! Jason then proceeded to tell him that if he had daughters with those eyes, he would be in trouble. I remember the man laughing, he responded that he had 3 little girls at home. Jason told him to buckle up and watch out when they get older. We all laughed. That was Jason. They went about doing all their pre-op stuff, it takes probably an hour, nothing is ever on time. They eventually will take him back. I of course, kiss him, hug him and tell him I love him. I am trying not to cry. I am nervous as all hell.
My mom and I are shuffled back to the waiting room. Jason’s surgery was called a right hemicolectomy. In non-medical terms, that means they removed the right side of his colon, and surrounding lymph nodes due to the cancers location. They reattached his small intestines to the remainder of his colon so that his bowels could function properly. The plan was for the surgery to be done laparoscopically.
After 4 long hours of waiting, Dr. Wiebe comes out come out and tells us they are done, and Jason is doing well.
In that moment, my body felt instant relief. She tells me and my mom that they had to make an incision and were not able to complete the surgery laparoscopically, like originally thought. This was because the mass in his colon was too big. I remember her describing this to me, vividly. She stated that the mass was about the size of a lemon. In that very moment I thought, oh my god, how long has this been here..My mind thought years, it had to be, anything that big… She mentions that they took a lot of lymph nodes, and that she thinks they got everything.
Another sigh of relief. It is all gone. She mentions she’s not an oncologist but she knows the next steps will be to get a PET scan to confirm there is no evidence of disease.
She says they will want to do Chemo. It was in his lymph nodes, and they will want to ensure it doesn’t come back. She says something next, that at the time my mind couldn’t comprehend, because I was hyper focused on the fact that they got everything.
She says, I can tell his cancer is aggressive.
I didn’t know it then, but that is not a word you want to hear, even if they had just gotten all the cancer out.
The conversation felt so preventative, like everything next was to prevent the cancer from coming back.
Because it was. Because in that moment, she was fairly confident, they had taken all the cancer out.
We will never know how long that lemon sized mass was in his colon. But the more I learned and experienced Jason’s cancer, the more I realized how likely wrong I was about it being there for many years.
Jason’s cancer was aggressive as hell.
At 36 years old Jason was, of course, not receiving routine colonoscopies, he was just under 10 years out from the age that opens the door to routine, preventative, screening. Unless, of course, you have a reason to receive early screening.
His symptoms, well, in the list of Colon Cancer symptoms, were actually few and far in-between. They feel so obvious now, when hindsight is 20/20. But Jason’s main and only real symptom was abdominal cramping, with the occasional straining to go to the bathroom. It wasn’t until a few weeks ahead of diagnosis that his bowel habits really changed so dramatically that we knew something was “wrong”.
He never had blood in his stool. His weight, eating, was all fairly consistent.
His symptoms at that point in time had become pain, not having any bowel movements and vomiting. This was because of the obstruction.
He was brushed off by urgent care a week ahead of diagnosis. They never mentioned or suggested of a CT or Colonoscopy. They suggested the Sushi he had may have been bad.
Cancer that appears on the right side of the colon often is caught at a later stage than cancer on the left side, due to the size of the right colon, there is more space for the cancer to grow until it causes pain. Sporadic cancer, typically appears in the ascending colon, cecum, or transverse colon. Cancer which appears in the right side of the colon and develops much more quickly, is most often associated with Lynch Syndrome.
I had not heard of Lynch Syndrome before Jason’s diagnosis. I was not aware that it ran in his family. I still don’t exactly know what Jason knew or had ever been told, but I know it wasn’t much, and it sure wasn’t what it should’ve been. Because up until this point, no one in Jason’s immediate family had ever been accurately tested for Lynch Syndrome.
