CANCER!

Well, that title got your attention!

The wife is going to be on TV – YouTube, actually – opposite a world-famous star.
I’ll send you the link later if you want.
You won’t see her face, just her guts, if you have the guts to watch.

The local YouTube videos are liberally sprinkled with Ontario Health PSA’s.  Middle-aged and older women, some alone, some with husbands/partners, all smiling at the camera, with the printed tagline,
I’m here because we caught it early!  😀

IT was cervical cancer!  Twenty years ago, a pap-smear result had me driving the daughter 75 miles to a specialty-clinic in the London, Ontario University Hospital, for a little nip and tuck, and removal of a small, pre-cancerous – or just-cancerous, polyp.  She’s still here because they caught it early.

THEN THERE’S THE WIFE!
It all started innocently enough….
(How often have I used that line?)

After the wife fell down and banged her head, her doctor started a battery of tests to find out why.  The first thing she discovered was that the wife was mildly anemic.  The cause is often a minor internal bleed, so she ordered a colonoscopy and a gastric endoscopy.  This is the wife’s fourth colonoscopy in 12 years.  She made the G.I. guy promise to do the top end first.

He found and removed several polyps from her stomach, upper intestine, and lower intestine….  Then he found a big, nasty one right exactly where you don’t want to find one – at the narrow bottom of the duodenum, the hardest point in the body to get to, and work at.  The local doctor and hospital have about an 80/85% confidence level, so he referred her to a specialty-clinic at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.  Any of the four surgeons, and the hospital’s high-tech equipment, rate 90/95% confidence.

He sent along color pictures.  We thought that the March 6^th visit would be for removal, but this guy wanted to do some more research.  A needle biopsy had indicated no evidence of cancer, but the big-city sawbones felt sure that there were some cancer cells sprinkled through it, that were randomly missed.

Whether cancerous or not, this thing’s got to come out – ASAP!  Already it almost blocks the passage, and getting bigger.  Scheduled surgery in Kitchener would have been mid-September.  Especially if this thing goes cancerous, that would be far too late.  The Toronto-doc could schedule it for mid- April.

This polyp is so large, so nasty, and so inaccessible, that our surgeon had all three of his partners watching the view-screen, offering thoughts and opinions, while he worked.  The best choice for removal was endoscopically, rather than invasive abdominal surgery.  He was pretty sure that he could take it out, but there were potential problems.  It’s a big mushroom.  If he snips it off too high up the stem, it and/or the cancer might regrow.  If he cut too close to the bottom, he might perforate the thin duodenum wall, damaging the liver and pancreas, and necessitating the abdominal surgery to repair the mishap.

One of the reasons that his best scheduled surgery date was mid-April, was that on March 28, 29, and 30^th, the clinic and hospital were hosting a world-wide conference of the best G.I. surgeons, including a ninja-Japanese surgeon with a confidence rating of 99/101%.  If this guy is not number one in the world, he’s in the top five

They were watching for problem cases like the wife’s, so that he could show his talents.  If we agreed, she would be part of a video of his work, to train and improve other surgeons.  Two of the benefits were that the operation would be done three weeks even sooner, and it would be done by the world’s best.  Of course we agreed – all that, and for free, under Canada’s socialized medical system.

***

Stay tuned.  Murphy got a chance to read the first draft, and has added some plot twists in the next chapter.   😳