I’m 31, and I’m Scheduling My First Colonoscopy for Next Month
Here’s why I’m doing it as a relatively young person and how to know when you might need to get one done.
First things first: if you have a history of cancer in your family, you can’t be too squeamish to talk about it, no matter what kind it is. I’m not saying you should dwell on it, because you shouldn’t. It shouldn’t dominate your life, this concern that you might have inherited some nonsense DNA. But if you know it’s a possibility, you have to ask yourself whether you’d like to find out for sure or ignore it and roll the dice.
Medical testing isn’t something that scares me. For me, it’s research and data collection. I’ve got plenty of piercings and tattoos, and I give myself weekly injections, so needles don’t bother me either.
And fortunately, neither does butt stuff. I get grossed out by poop sometimes, but I’ve had enough people and plugs in my ass to get over the insertion issue. It just isn’t a big deal for me.
But why, you may ask, is a 31-year-old about to have a colonoscopy? Is it some weird medical fetish? That’s a thing, probably, but it’s not one of my proclivities.
The reason I’m doing this now is that my mom was diagnosed with rectal cancer at age 41. The other week, I had my first endoscopy, which revealed gastroparesis, or GP for short. I was informed, during the follow-up, that there was quite a bit of food still in my stomach. That checks out.
My doctor had apparently missed it in my chart, but when I brought it up that my mom had had rectal cancer, it got his attention pretty quickly.
He told me that, among those with a family history of colorectal cancer, whenever possible, it’s best to start doing a colonoscopy about once a year, beginning ten years prior to the date of onset of the family member’s cancer. He also made it sound like, since this involves a first-degree blood relation, it’s even more important to get on top of this. Sooner is better.
Incidentally, because my partner is a couple decades older than me, and because his last colonoscopy revealed some precancerous polyps, he’s due for one as well. So we’ve decided to schedule them on the same day at around the same time and have his parents drive us home afterward.
Once again, screw being too shy about this stuff. If I’ve got a rogue cell on a mission about to cause some havoc in one or more of mine or my partner’s organs, I want to know about that.
I grew up surrounded by sickness. This is, admittedly, a dramatic phrasing of the problem, but I feel that I cannot overstate the significance of the experience and how it educated me and formed me as a person. The relevant part, right now, is that I’ve seen many examples of how bad things can get. We all have to go sometime, but I’ve seen a lot of long, drawn-out, life-ruining sickness leading to a very slow, painful, and often humiliating and/or terrifying death.
I’ve also been around the block enough to know that it doesn’t have to be that way all the time. Some things are unavoidable, but seeing as how I’m 31 years old and have access to medical care (at least for now), I’d rather not assume I’m headed for the same kind of outcome.
And that’s where testing comes in. That’s also where having open, honest, and sometimes very difficult conversations about health and family history are key. Eventually, my mom did die of cancer, though not the rectal type they found in 2006. They found metastatic lung cancer that had spread to the liver and spine in 2017, and she was dead 28 days later.
Now, I’m obviously thankful that I quit smoking in 2012, before I knew to predict any of 2017’s shenanigans. I only smoked for about four years, and I think my outlook in terms of pulmonary health is probably okay. But my real questions don’t concern her death or those 28 days, for the most part. I have a couple of curiosities about that, but what I want to know about now concerns how she and the other uterus-having folks in our family lived. What were their symptoms? What were they diagnosed with, when, and by whom? And was it an appropriate, fitting diagnosis, given by a competent doctor?
All other things being equal, what do you think should have or could have been done differently? This is not a question of placing blame, though, even on less-than-competent physicians. (I have a lot to say about that, too, but this is not the time.) There may be options available now that were not available then. Insurance and financial difficulties may have gotten in the way. Symptoms can be misinterpreted or dismissed at any stage of the game. Do not waste time pointing fingers if you could use that time to find remedies or at least alleviate some of the burden instead.
As I sat with my mom in hospice, I remarked to my dad, who was at home and not there, that I wanted to punch my mother’s prior doctor so hard in the teeth he bites his own heart. I was livid and ready to duke it out with this elderly physician in the parking lot of the local Waffle House. Like, pure Floridian rage. I might have turned into an actual alligator and bitten off one or more of his appendages, such was my rage at his negligence.
And I would have made sure they’d be things he would miss.
It may have been cathartic, and it was a nice thought that kept me energized for these 24-hour days. But it wouldn’t have changed anything.
What might have changed something is if my mother had had access to adequate healthcare earlier in life, if she hadn’t had to work herself into an early grave — she was only 52 when she died — just to make ends meet, and if she’d known better a decade or more prior. She didn’t, but I do now.
She was adjudicated disabled in her mid to late 40s. I was adjudicated disabled in 2017, but it was made retroactive, going back to when I was around 23 or 24. There’s every chance, I suppose, that it could be too late for me. At half her age, I have 80% or more of her symptoms. That’s pretty bonkers, but at least I can do something about it, and that’s what I’m doing my best to focus on, rather than crying over regrets all the time.
No judgment, though. Everyone cries about regrets a time or ten in their lives. And I guess that’s the real wisdom I can offer, if any: you can scream and cry all you want, but you’ve also got to do the work and ask hard questions for things to change. Sometimes that means you have to talk about things that aren’t easy to talk about. Other times, it means you have to get someone to stick a tube with a camera up your butthole to make nothing is in there that isn’t supposed to be.
