Story So Far, Part I
There are so many potential places to begin telling this story. Any of them will feel arbitrary, so let’s start on an arbitrary day in November 2009. The first Wednesday, the 4th. According to my Outlook calendar, I’m in Bloomington, IL talking to clients and flying out of Midway back to Baltimore that night. I don’t remember this day, but I can guarantee that these things were happening (in no particular order):
- I was tired.
- I was excited about getting engaged over Halloween.
- I was worried about work.
- I was worried about selling my condo.
- I was anxious to get home to Baltimore.
- I was wondering why strange things were appearing in my stool.
According to texts I sent Lisa that night, my flight was delayed due to a lack of flight attendants, I ate some chocolate, I had a Jack & Ginger, the flight was almost empty, I landed, took the shuttle to the BWI’s Blue lot and drove home to be with my gal.
The 6th item on this list had been happening for a month or so. I chalked it up to a combination of items 1, 3, and 4. When the holidays ended and the 2010 To Do list was made, it included finding a Baltimore general practitioner. In the middle of January, I saw a doctor highly recommended by Lisa and her friends who has an office a three minutes walk from our house. During that walk, I stayed on a conference call with some co-workers, said my piece about compromising too much with the client, dropped a joke about work causing me an ulcer as I opened the clinic’s door and hung up.
I liked the doctor. I liked being able to say no to many of his questions: no smoking, no drugs, no medication, no family history of serious illness. When I described what was happening, I self-diagnosed it as stress. He seemed to agree, but listed other possibilities. I don’t remember them now, other than cancer, which I dismissed immediately. Cancer didn’t happen in my family. We were a heart disease/stroke kind of folk.
The doctor scheduled a colonoscopy for the beginning of February, and Lisa and I flew to San Francisco for a week’s vacation that rocked and ruled. One day we rented a Zip Car to get Lisa and bridal committee member Laurel to a dress shop while I sat in the car on 24th St in the Mission and talked to the endoscopy place about what they called the “bowel prep”. I still have the notes I scribbled about which colored liquids were OK when and the words “maralax + gatorade mix”.
This was one of the few sunny days of our visit, I was looking forward to reading in a coffee shop, then lunch at a place called the Old Clam House.
I didn’t know what Maralax was and I didn’t care.