GOOD FOR ANOTHER 30,000 MILES....

It was time for my regular colonoscopy last spring.  In fact I already had made an appointment for May during my vacation, but cancelled it because I didn't want to take two whole days out of my time off since we were going to Savannah's graduation and I was going to go with Louis on his business trip.

Then it became harder for me to pick up the phone to make a new appointment.  I let just about every excuse in the book be justification for putting that procedure off...and off...and off.  It was summer.  I had to take on-line classes, study, and attend yearly requalification. It was my line month.  It was my reserve month.  The roof needed to be replaced.  I had to get my car fixed.....  Until FINALLY I couldn't put it off any more.  This is something that isn't really so awful, I just hate the preparation for it.  But I should look at the very positive side:  colonoscopies can save lives.

The day after I graduated from the eighth grade--after the hoopla surrounding my being the Salutatorian and having to give a speech at graduation, and all the parties and the activies my mother supported me in for that occasion and event--my dad put her on the train and she went to Salt Lake City to see the doctor.  I didn't know at the time that she had been suffering from some kind of bowel disorder for several months.

The next thing I knew, she was in the hospital in Salt Lake City and had undergone major surgery for cancer of the colon.  She was 58 years old.  In those days--this was 1960--just about the only thing the doctors could do was perform a colostomy which meant remove the cancerous part of the bowel which necessitated wearing a pouch around the waist which captured solid bodily waste.  Not only was that procedure pretty much an indication of a death sentence--people didn't recover from colon cancer--but it also confined the patient to home as a virtual prisoner.  No one who had had a colostomy went out in public.  They smelled like a sewer, and there was a very good possibility that the bag would leak.  
I know my mother was well aware of that nasty fact.
  
Case in point.  John Dexter was a brother in our ward.  He was a handsome older man, slim and with beautiful pristinely white hair.  He had been diagnosed with colon cancer, had the colostomy, and died within months. Even as a kid about 10 or 11 years old, I knew that.

But my mother's doctor did a new and experimental surgery on her.  He removed the affected and cancerous colon, then fashioned a new rectum.  However, the sphincter muscle was missing, so she had to take an enema every day for the rest of her life.  Hence for those of you who can remember, THAT was what her CHORES were every morning which you might remember her being in the bathroom for so long each day no matter where she was.

Over the summer of 1960 my mother had two more major surgeries to try and stem the advance of the cancer.  I don't think they had chemo or radiation then.  She didn't lose her hair or anything, but she was very, very ill.  I knew THAT for sure because my dad called for a prayer circle.  In a family who didn't have regular family prayer, I knew when the prayer circle was called things were NOT GOOD.  

After my mother was discharged from the hospital at the end of that long, long summer vacation, Beth took her to her home to convalese for a few more weeks before she could come home to Rawlins--just before school began in the fall when I started high school as a freshman.

Essentially my mother was a cancer survivor for almost 25 years during which she unfailingly saw the doctor regularly for Barium enemas and colonoscopies to check on her condition.  In the early months of 1984, she and my dad went to Salt Lake City for my mother's regularly scheduled exams.  It was during that routine exam, that the .01% possibility of the bowel being perforated during the procedure happened.  Only in spite of the fact my mother told them she was sure something terrible had happened as she could feel that something had occured which had not happened before, they sent her home to Glenda's.  During that night my mother became extremely ill with fever and severe pain.  Her abdominal cavity had filled with waste and she was contaminated.

That's when the doctors finally did a colostomy--which by then 25 years later wasn't the horrible thing it had been years earlier.  My mother could have recovered from that, I'm sure, but she suffered a small heart attack, contracted pneumonia and eventually died from that medical condition in April 1984 just before we moved to Berlin.

Sooooo, that is why I have to have the colonoscopy more frequently than most other old people.  And once again I have a completely clean bill of health.  The colonoscopy is small price to pay for peace of mind from a procedure that could probably have helped detect my mother's cancer long before the advanced stages wherein she finally went to the doctor in Salt Lake City--AFTER supporting me in a good eventful time of my life.  She sacrificed for me who had NO clue how ill she had been for months.

Apparently right now, it looks like I am going to dodge THAT cancerous  bullet which reinforces all thinking from you who are convinced I am never going to die.  At least not from that, though when I signed the paper that day in the doctor's office that in some rare .01% of cases it is possible that the bowel could be perforated, I did reflect briefly on my mother's experience.  But....when I opened my eyes all was well once again.  

I give thanks daily for my good health.  I believe it is compensation from a loving Father for a couple of really crappy things that have happened in my life.