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Welcome to part 2 of my 3-part series on facing one of the toughest challenges of my life and my sobriety: finding out I had Stage 4 cancer in April. In part 1, which I linked to here, I talked about starting out on chemo and trying to juggle sobriety with all the other stuff going on in my life.
Part 1 of the recovery journey was tough but it went well. The chemo worked. They had seen significant damage to the tumors in my liver and rectal area, and my doctors were encouraged about my overall response to chemo. So that bode well for me.
But now, I had a massive surgery scheduled for the end of September. I knew it was a massive surgery. I knew it was going to be hard. I knew I had support. I knew I’d be down for the count in a big way, for possibly months. And yet… it was brutal.
The day of the surgery, we had to be at the hospital by about 5 am. The surgery was scheduled for seven hours. One surgeon was going to cut about 20 percent of my liver out. The other surgeon would cut out my rectal tumor. It would take all day.
I went under that day and woke up seven hours later, and I was extremely out of it. I would be having a conversation and just fall asleep mid-sentence. It was bizarre.
But one huge thing registered no matter what my state of mind from the anesthesia: my rectal surgeon had somehow managed to not have to do a colostamy bag. That was a mini miracle. I had been prepping for a bag for months, knowing that I would have to have my whole system rewired for a few months. I had begrudgingly accepted that it was in my future, but it was the absolute worst fear of mine. I just couldn’t get my head around having a colostamy bag.
So that was the great news.
But things went south pretty quickly. On Thursday and Friday in the hospital, I was able to drink some apple juice and water and other clear fluids. But still no food—it had been about four days without anything to eat. My doctor on Friday assured me I’d be eating cheeseburgers any day now.
Well, that day didn’t come for awhile. I had a nasty, nasty weekend. I had 59 staples from my stomach to my chest holding me together from the incision, and they also had to do a liver drain, which was a plastic grenade-shaped bottle coming directly out of my liver. Apparently the liver gets hyperactive after a surgery, so excess fluid is produced and has to be drained.
By Friday night, I was starting to feel really bad. I had developed an ileus, which essentially means your digestive system stopped working. Mine was completely dormant. They couldn’t hear any of the normal gurgles and digestive noises, and I started to feel my stomach get bigger and bigger. Nothing was moving through my system, and it hurt so bad. By the middle of the night on Friday, I needed a nurse to come in and stick a tube down my nose into my stomach to drain everything. For the next five days, I had a plastic container that just filled with digestive grossness as my body struggled to start back up.
It got really dark and scary for me during those few days. The nights were horrific. No sleep. Constant pain. I had wires and cords coming out of everywhere on me, so I could barely move. Those were some of the worst nights of my life. I didn’t want to die… but if you told me I could go into a coma for a month till my body heals, I would have signed the papers in a heartbeat. It really started to break my spirit in a scary way.
But on Monday morning, things started to turn around. I got some better nursing care than I had gotten from the weekend shift, and I had lots of sober friends stopping by and scheduling Zoom meetings to try to keep me engaged. So I ultimately pulled through.
One big thing I want to talk about was pain management through all this. I was in tremendous pain, but I was declining pain medication as much as possible. My nurse and my family eventually cornered me and said, “If you don’t take pain medication, you might set back your own recovery. You cannot be in agony all day.” So I started on a morphine pump and some other narcotics, and I took them as prescribed. I guess they helped, but honestly, I was in so much pain that it felt pointless to take them. I was very leery about the whole narcotic thing because opioids are a huge reason why I got an all-expenses pain trip to rehab back in 2008. They were my main drug of choice, though “all of them” might be a better answer for what I used to do.
On Tuesday or Wednesday of that week, I was really on the upswing. I was walking around and they were hearing my system starting back up again. I still couldn’t eat or drink anything but I felt like I was on the right path. And by the end of the week, they were saying I could come home. As an added bonus, when I was about an hour away from leaving the hospital, one of the surgeons came in and said as far as the tests were showing, they had gotten all the cancer out. It looked like there was nothing else cancerous in those two areas.
So when I walked out of the hospital, I was flying high… even though I wasn’t high. I declined painkillers leaving the hospital, and I was so glad I did. I definitely suffered a little bit more than a regular civilian might have. But I also didn’t have to worry about flaring up the allergy again—I have no idea what will happen if I take that first drink or drug, so I didn’t really want to chance it here.
For the next six weeks, I just tried to heal. They pulled the liver drain out a week or so later, and it was about as excruciating as anything I’ve gone through. It felt like somebody was paper cutting my entire midsection as they yanked this long tube out of there. It took me an hour of laying down in the doctor’s office before I could walk out of there.
And the next day, over the course of about 10 minutes, a nurse pulled each one of those 59 staples out of my midsection. I’ll never forget the clink-clink-clink-clink over and over again, 59 times.
But I walked out of the office that day feeling like I had turned a corner. The recovery was longgg—my midsection still hurts four months later—and painful. But I did recover.
Now I had one more big hurdle in front of me to finish treatment: 12 more weeks of chemotherapy.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
A woman comes home after a couple of hours spent drinking in her favorite tavern. As she falls through the doorway, her husband snaps at her, “What’s the big idea coming home half drunk?”
The woman replies, “I’m sorry, honey, I ran out of money.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, Feb. 2000, Shirlene)
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