The Dark Years...

Hi! seems like a generation has passed by since i last logged in to this blog...

As i touched upon in my July'09 post...I had really gone through bad times few years back.

Things are beginning to settle down slowly ...or so it seems.

Those two years - 2006-2008 , was the toughest for me...and it practically stopped everything in my life. It was just hospitals, medicines and a constant fear of death that would hover around me.

My parents had come to Chennai for doing a thorough check-up of my father who had a complaint of a pain in the left side of his torso. The pain would come suddenly without warning and as per my father's description it was very severe, no medicine was able to subdue the pain and then... after few hours it would disappear....only to appear again after few days or weeks later.

Doctors in Assam are notorious of terming these kind of pains which are in fact, warning signals of a fatal disease, as gastric or some kind of water borne bacterial attack. And so the innocent victims would be prescribed cheap drugs for temporary relief. Little did i expect that my father had fallen prey to this.

After a failure to diagnose for a minimum of 1 year, a doctor finally recommended my father to go to Chennai for a complete check up.

We decided to meet a doctor of gastroenterology first. He recommended a series of blood tests and Scans.

Everything was normal, except two results:

1) The blood test showed that he was very low in hemoglobin ( or the Red Blood cells) , it was around 7 whereas the normal range for a male is 13 -16

2) The CT scans had a comment that there was some irregular lining in the colon ( the large intestine) and the cecum ( the point where the large intestine and the small intestine meets)

and there were two lesions in his liver.

We knew that the blood tests results seems to indicate something bad, but then there can be a host of other factors that could lead to a deficiency. Cancer was not there even in the remotest corner of our minds. My mother was always positive.

We took the reports to the doctor and to our surprise, he looked very, very worried. Nevertheless he told that my father had to undergo one more tests a test where they would insert a stem with an attached camera through the anus to see what actually is the situation up there. The procedure is know as colonoscopy which is fairly unknown to most people, but is a recommended procedure by surgeon general in the USA for everyone, once in every 2 years for individuals above the age of 50.

The procedure is an uncomfortable one for the patient, and the doctor found out that there was indeed some nasty growth in his intestine .He took a sample of the growth and sent it for biopsy. He spoke to me later and he sounded not too optimistic, i remember the words clearly - " i suspect this is indeed cancer , and i would be happy if i am proved wrong"

The results were supposed to come in the next 4 days and it was the longest 4 days for all of us.

On the forth day I went to collect the results and to our worst nightmare the report had one sentence in bold Adenocarcinoma grade 3. Well, for a moment I felt my whole world is coming down. I hated to believe what i was reading.

I took the reports to the doctor, who already knew the results...he wanted me to admit my father immediately to try to remove the cancerous growth. And that was not all the CT scan has mentioned some lesions in my fathers liver too and he suspected them to be secondaries and thats a very very bad thing to happen.

I came home and broke the news - that was the worst thing i had ever told anyone. No one would like to hear anything like this.

The night was all crying and anxious anticipation of whats in store for us in the days to come...

And those were days i would like to erase off from my memories completely...but it is impossible to do that. And i still get that creepy feeling which seems so very familiar even today. The constant fear of death lurking just near by. I did some searches on the net and that made my fears even more powerful. Almost all the articles related to my fathers condition gave a 1 year survivability statistics to less than 10%. That is , out of 100 people in the stage that my father was, only less than 10 people lived more than 1 year.

5 year survivability was less than 4 %.

I knew right then ... we have really bad times ahead of us.

And it was worse than my fears could fathom. We faced days that as my mother would put it - We dont want even our enemies to go through.

I can't go any longer on this today... The scenes are coming to me vividly as i write and i dont want to end up dreaming about the whole thing tonight all over again. May be some other day some other post...may be after a long time i would write the rest of this sad story...

Cheers to life and to all the goodness it has to offer.