Thread by @ssteingraber1

COLONOSCOPY PSA for everyone age 40 and over*

*(with special message for #adoptees)

So I spent the last two weeks waiting for results from the pathology lab after my colonoscopy on 7/29 and I’m now here to tell you why you need to follow me into that procedure room, friends.

I got the results yesterday. One of the two polyps found and removed from my body was almost certainly NOT going to turn into my assassin. But the other one was of the kind that can and do.

But it’s out now. And that means that mf-er is not going to be the cause of my death.

Here are the three great things about colon cancer. (All the other things about it are wretched and miserable.)

1) Unlike almost all other cancers, colon tumors go through predictable, progressive stages of growth and development before becoming deranged psychopaths.

That means if you can catch a lesion early —while it is still a polyp (aka tumor-in-training) and before it achieves malignancy and sets up branch offices in your liver—you can almost always just snip it out and be done with it. Hence saving yourself from a cancer diagnosis.

Second, your colon—unlike, say, your breasts or your brain—is accessible from the outside world. And that means the same screening technique used to for counter-intelligence purposes to find these potential assassins-in-training can also eliminate them on the spot.

And THAT means a tool of cancer detection (the colonoscopy) doubles as cancer prevention. There few other cancer screenings you can say that about.

By contrast, mammograms basically just produce blurry pictures of Bigfoot and are notoriously bad at accurately finding bad things

Also—and I can’t stress this enough—while mammograms can find cancer (albeit badly) they do not prevent breast cancer.

Again, colonoscopies find AND can prevent.

Indeed colon cancer, which is the second leading cause of cancer death in the US, has fallen 30 percent among people over 50 who are targeted for colonoscopy screening. Yay!

gastroconsa.com/colon-cancer-2…

Your bladder, like your colon, is also accessible to the outside world.

Hence, cystoscopies work the same way for the bladder except you can’t snip bad things out of your bladder when found during a screening…

…And that’s because the inside lining of your bladder is full of nerve endings. So to remove possible bladder tumors-in-progress, you need a separate procedure with anesthesia.

This leads me to the third good thing: The lining of your colon has no nerve endings. When your new BFF, the gastroenterologist, reaches in, locates, and snip out polyps you can’t feel a thing.

Colonoscopies are one-stop shopping for cancer prevention. Seek, strike, and destroy.

Here’s some scary news: the number of performed colonoscopies fell dramatically in the last year likely bc of the pandemic.

I want you to reschedule that appointment. Before the delta variant gets even worse. Before the winter. Just make the damn call.

google.com/amp/s/mobile.r…

I myself have had more cystoscopes (starting at age 20) and colonoscopies (starting at 35) than anyone you will ever meet. They are no fun. I have medical trauma bc of it. But there is a huge upside to being alive and cancer-free. Also you get bragging rights for bravery.

I happen to do all my colonoscopies without narcotics. It’s not that painful, I don’t lose a day of work to fentanyl stupor, and I can drive myself home.

Here’s my essay about how to do colonoscopy without missing work. With tips for the prep night!

livingdownstream.com/essays/how_to_…

Okay, I’m now turning to my fellow adoptees: colon cancer among people under 50 is on the rise for unknown reasons. But you largely can’t get insurance to pay for colonoscopies under age 50 unless you can demonstrate a family history. This is another injustice for us.

When I became severely anemic at age 35, I was recommended for colonoscopy only because I had a paranoid primary care doc unwilling to assume my “family history unknown” = “no family history” as so many other docs do AND also because…

..I happened to know that my biological maternal grandmother had had colon cancer at a young age.

And how do I know that?

Because weirdly I happened to overhear a conversation about her between two librarians at a tiny branch library in the Ozark mountains. But that’s a story for another day.

I am not reunited with my birth family. I do not have medical history—other than this one tidbit that may have saved my life—and I cannot get the genetic test for familial colon cancer without a documented family history which means…

…The frequency of my colonoscopies is an uniformed guess by my gastroenterologist who straight up told me last week that he is “furious” that I don’t know my family medical history.

Brother and sister adoptees: I see you and love you. Fight for your right to be considered vulnerable to health problems for which early screening matters.

#adoptee
#AdopteeVoices

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