It was on Thursday last week I met up with the doctor at the university hospital in Tampere. He was a gastroenterologist and I was about to meet him for the second time to learn about the results of my CT scan and blood tests. My wife was home taking care of the kids. The doctor was 15 minutes late and when he arrived there was a shortage of rooms for the consultation as his own was used by another doctor. It took another 15 minutes to get a room arranged. He asked how I was doing. I replied pretty well and that I had the night before returned from a business trip to Bonn, Germany. He had some trouble logging into the system on the computer and tried to make a joke about that. He started explaining the results of the blood tests and that there was a very high value on a protein. After this point, I can't remember more the details of the conversation that followed, but the scan and the blood tests had proven that the tumours in the liver were malignant, i.e. I had cancer. The only thing I remember saying was ”huh-huh”. The diagnosis was however not yet complete but the doctor strongly suspected that the origin of the cancer was in the colon. The following morning I would have to come back for a colonoscopy and he also wanted me to take my wife with me.
I remember the situation in the room with the doctor was so surreal. It felt as if there was a third person to whom the message had been given and that I was there as an observer. I got sick-leave until the end of August as he couldn't give it for a longer period of time. I remember we discussed the probability of me ever returning to work. The probability was very low. I left the hospital, went back to work, put on an out-of-office note in Outlook, gave the sick-leave paper to my boss and drove home. I couldn't understand it but I knew my life had just taken a totally different direction.
The following morning I was back at the hospital with my wife. The gastroenterologist asked if we could have a conversation already before the colonoscopy as the examination room was not free yet. My wife was feeling a bit dizzy and had to lie down where patients normally lie and I sat in a chair. He delivered us some tough messages. The blood test results indicated the tumours in my liver were most probably metastases of a colon cancer, and a colon cancer which has sent metastases to liver and lymph nodes is incurable. He was not a cancer doctor but he gave me an estimate that I would have three months left to live if no cancer treatment would be started, and six more months if treatments would be started. I still felt as being the observer in the room and that the situation the doctor described would be the one of someone else.
With this information in mind, I went through the colonoscopy and the doctor found the tumour he was looking for about 20cm inside.
It was Friday morning and the gastroenterologist had made the diagnosis and said I would now be transferred to the cancer treatment department. We could call there on Tuesday the following week to find out what would happen next. More about that in another post.
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