The Bloody Doors Off

(This post is displayed in 4K where available. Regardless, there are videos to help inform. You don’t need to watch, but it expands the message.)

This has been my mantra since sometime in January.

(The 10th and 16th specifically, Marlo is able to inform me.

She has a very busy daily calendar for her own purposes, but she also keeps tabs on the Boy and I.

For purposes where I start a blog post and can’t remember exactly when this started.)

After a successful colonoscopy (in that it actually happened, and wasn’t rebooked a third time because drinking four litres of PegLyte didn’t clean me out enough), the doctor mentioned he’d found one polyp, and that it was sent for testing.

Pretty routine. They don’t shine a light up your sphincter because it’s a fetish that they advertised in the back pages of NOW Magazine.

And he says:

“I’m going to schedule you for a CT enterography (okay, I had to look up the exact procedure from the confirmation letter from Mt. Sinai). And I’ll follow up with a call in mid-March.”

I think nothing of it.

Then I kinda thought about it.

Because.

How can I not think about it, really?

And I have this moment I am now accrediting to the show Seinfeld.

A mantra.

It’s nothing until it’s something.

(You can hear it in your head, spoken multiple times between Jerry, Elaine, Kramer and George.)

I mean, it can’t be anything because at present, there is no data support the existence of something. Ergo, it is nothing, and remain so until there is new data.

Boom.

It’s outta my head. I’ve proven Occam’s Razor.

Until tonight.

Because, I can’t call it data, but it is a hypothesis.

• Hundreds, if not thousands, of Toronto residents age 50 and over get a colonoscopy every five years

• How many of them receive a letter from a major hospital, booking you in for a scan of your upper bowel, and it’s a two hour appointment and you’ll have to drink two litres of a drink (they won’t say what it is, but I can guess; thankfully, it won’t be PegLyte, that stuff is nasty), and we’ll be injecting a high contrast dye to improve the image

• How many doctors also schedule the aforementioned follow-up call?

I’m guessing not many.

Now, all this came about because I’d visited my doctor for a completely unrelated issue (which I can’t even remember at the moment), and she’d noticed that my red blood cell count had been dropping over the last nine months and she wanted to rule out any internal bleeding. The doc also asked if I’d been losing weight, but I didn’t know.

There are things they look for in the enterography:

• Inflammation
• Tumors
• Bowel obstructions or abscesses
• The source of bleeding
• Location and severity of Crohn’s disease

Let’s rule out Crohn’s now.

That still leaves four things most looked for.

And, yeah.

It freaks me out a little.

I wish there was a procedure à la Severance. Just for this particular thought train. And it’s reversible. Obviously.

I repeat the phrase.

It’s nothing until it’s something.

The mantra is strong, still. It has power.

And then, dislodging itself from the shadows is a memory from 10 years ago.

Reminding me. No matter how tightly you held onto the safety bar on the mental and emotional rollercoaster that was 2013 (my descent started in March), shit is gonna happen and, at this exact moment, you are sitting in the back seat of a driverless car.

I cannot predict the biopsy results from the polyps (two in total, one from the endoscopy that went aces during the first appointment).

They will provide the results. And you know what that means?

Data to strengthen or disprove my hypothesis.

But right now, the spreadsheet is blank.

All this is to say.

Tonight is not easy for me.

Tomorrow will be better.

It has to be.

It must be.

There is no other option.

Because we know.

It’s nothing.

Until it’s something.