This is the first of my ongoing series of articles on my dealing with cancer starting in November of 2011. If you are squeamish or don't approve of the use of medically correct (or in some cases simply pragmatic) terminology then you might check out the lead in to the topic on my blog before you read further. richard
I'd had a sore back; nothing peculiar since we were renovating the house and of course there's always lots to carry and move and shift and push against when you're doing destruction/construction that in our case involved every door in the house, all the floors and a lot of cleanup of the yard. We'd not done any major renovations since moving in almost 18 years before, and it was time.
So I backed off a bit on the physical and let my cousin Marian and by friend Ken do much of that part of the work. Besides, I'm the breadwinner of the family and had to keep the finances flowing, so I spent more time in front of my computer and working on customer projects.
Eventually part of the backache went away, but another part didn't. In fact, it started to get worse - to the point that some nights I'd lie down to sleep and immediately have to get back up and sit on the edge of the bed moaning with pain. Again, nothing really peculiar. I'd "cheated" on the not doing anything physical - stepping in and lending a 3rd hand when needed, pruning bushes and trees and carrying stuff to the trailer to eventually take to the dump; nothing "heavy," but not exactly "nothing" either. And besides, this pain was shaping up to be similar in many fashions to ones I'd had in the past, ones associated with stomach ulcer.
I'm kind of prone to stomach ulcers you see. I have a fairly acid stomach and can't tolerate (or so I found out by experiment) hard liquor in any even reasonabe quantity - I'd get a bleeding ulcer at the drop of a hat so to speak
I was invited to a Robbie Burns dinner back in about 1999 by my good friends David and Jose Ingram. The evening progressed and along with all the Haggis and other Scottish festivities I found myself the recipient of about 6 or 8 shots of fine, single malt, scotch whiskey. Some were the second shots I'd take when buying a round of similar fair for my friends, some were their shouts to me. What could the harm be? I normally only drank wine and beer, and that evening I put the whiskey on top of a wonderful dinner as well.
Right... That was Friday evening and by Sunday morning I had a full-fledged bleeding ulcer attack, complete with obvious blood in my stool. To the doctor I went on Monday. Wednesday, when he used a gastro endoscope on me his comments were, "I can see where the ulcer was, but it is well on its way to healing and should be gone in a week or so"
That's been my most recent experience with ulcers, but this one was a bit different; it was sneaking up on me, taking far longer than normal to really manifest itself, and showing itself as back pain it seems.
So I went to the doctor and said "Doc, I think I have an ulcer." To which his reply was, "OK - what are the symptoms that lead you to this diagnosis?" and we went on from there. Knowing what I do know about ulcers (I'm sensitized to the word ulcer as my father died on the operating table while being treated for a bleeding ulcer) what I had compiled was in fact a pretty good diagnosis, except for the pain in the back. Yes, it also manifested itself at times as the classic pain just under the sternum - that "burning" sensation that I typically get when I'm hungry and many others get from acid reflux but which is also a classic sign of a duodenal ulcer; and it was the back pain that had me stumped.
Ahhh... he said, but it is not unknown for ulcers to show up as back pain, a fact I had not known. So he gave me some samples of a new "proton pump inhibitor" (acid reducer pills) to try, and said "4 to 6 weeks should clear this up," and I went on an ulcer diet.
That should have been the beginning of the end of it, but it wasn't; not by a long shot as things turned out.