A sobering encounter with my own mortality

I just had a scary, but ultimately beneficial experience yesterday. As many of your know (and by you I mean the few friends and family members who actually read this blog), I've been dealing with digestive system issues for a while now. Not to go into too many details, but I was tentatively diagnosed with IBS a couple of years ago. My doctor had mentioned about 6 months ago that I might want to consider getting a colonoscopy just to rule out some other stuff a lot worse than IBS (any of which was very, very unlikely). I finally got around to doing it a couple of weeks ago. I am so glad that I did it. If I wouldn't have had the procedure, I would have most likely developed colon cancer by the time I was 40.

See, when they did the colonoscopy, they found a polyp in my intestines. Having polyps before the age of 50 is very, very rare, so my doctor was surprised to say the least. However, right after the procedure he said he was almost certain it was the benign kind since I had no risk factors. (I'm basically the opposite of all the risk factors for colon polyps. Risk factors include: being older in age, male, African-American, smoking, eating a high-fat diet, and getting no exercise.) It was like a 1% chance it would be a problematic polyp. When I saw him for the results of the biopsy yesterday, though, he had some unexpected news - the polyp was pre-cancerous! In technical terms it is called an adenomatous polyp. It's pre-cancerous because these kind take 5-10 years for it to develop into cancer. Given I'm 32 now and it had been there for a couple of years, I probably would have developed colon cancer in my late 30s. As long as I get colonoscopies every 3 years for the rest of my life, though, I should be fine, as they remove the polyps during this procedure.

Since there is no reason why a reasonably healthy person in their 30s with no risk factors would ever get a colonoscopy, I actually have to thank all my stomach problems. If I wouldn't have had IBS then I never would have had this procedure and found this potentially life-threatening (and totally unrelated) condition.


So in honor of my not getting cancer in a few years, last night I consumed my three favorite things that trigger an IBS attack - alcohol, cheese, and chocolate. Yeah for IBS!