Toward the beginning of 2006, my UC was doing pretty good behaving itself, but I'd occasionally have a little bit of pain in my side like things weren't digesting fast enough. Normally that feeling would last a couple hours and go away, but in February one day it came on and just wouldn't quit. I tried laying on my side and my stomach and twisting this way and that in an effort to get whatever was making my side ache to move along and it just wouldn't comply, so at 9:00 pm I ended up going to the emergency room. At 12:00 midnight I got tired of sitting in the emergency room waiting (I wasn't terminal so wasn't high on the priority list), so I left and decided to return in the morning when less people were falling apart. I guess people would rather sleep in then go to the emergency room.

So, 6:00am and the pain is still there, so off to the emergency room I go. I still sat in the waiting room for an hour, but they were finally able to see me. After a bunch of tests, it turned out my gall bladder was having issues. Rather than being about 2 inches across, mine was 5 inches, and the determination was made that it needed to come out. They thought it could have been caused by an infection but they weren't sure. I guess normally high fat diets are more likely to cause gall bladder problems but I had been on a low fat diet for years because of my UC. If anything, my gall bladder should have been coasting for years.

The next day they did a procedure which I can't remember what it was called. Basically they put me under a sedative which they called a "conscious sedative" which would keep me away but where I wouldn't remember a thing the following day. Very weird, and totally true. Once under the sedative, they passed a probe down my throat all the way through me to the point where they could use tiny forceps on the probe end to remove a couple gall stones in my bile ducts. They wanted to do this before the gall bladder surgery to make sure they were taken care of.

The following day they did the gall bladder surgery laproscopically and everything went fine. They said that it's such a common surgery and it has been performed so many times that the chances of something going wrong are really small. In my case, it came off without a hitch.

Recovery from the surgery was easy at first, but my UC ended up causing some complications. First off I was on Vicodin which really sent my UC into a major tail spin. Everything we tried to get it under control just seemed to make it worse. Finally my doctor suggested we try Purinethol which from what I understand is a drug they initially gave to Leukemia patients but found out works pretty well with IBD sufferers too. He said "There's a really small chance it can cause pancreatitis but out of all my patients, I only have one lady that that has been a problem." So thinking I was on the road to feeling better, I started taking that evil medicine.

I took Purinethol for 3 weeks I think... it's all a pretty big blur now. I remember having pretty bad stomach aches for probably 80% of the time, day or night, whether I ate or not. I'd get hunger pains so fast and so bad that I once got in the shower not hungry at all and within 5 minutes I almost got out of the shower to go eat. Worst though was that even though I was eating 3 meals a day, I got down to 139 pounds, and I'm 6'1 or so. The doctor said I was probably developing pancreatitis, so I did what I had done the previous 17 years for my UC. I stopped taking all medications and went back to managing it myself through diet. Within a couple weeks I was putting on weight again and able to return to work

So wrap your brain around this one. During that time when I was really feeling the worst was when I had my first colonoscopy scheduled and had to cancel it because I just didn't feel good enough. It wasn't until just over a year later that I had to see that same doctor for the liver weirdness when he insisted on doing the colonoscopy that found the cancer. Had they done the first colonoscopy and not found the cancer, I can almost guarantee you that I would not have had this second colonoscopy and I likely wouldn't have had one at all until it was too late for them to catch it in time.