I had been to the hospital the day before Christmas Eve with an attack of acute appendicitis. I had felt an unusual pain in my abdomen that morning and finally got in to see my doctor fairly late in the afternoon (at the insistence of my wife, Jan). He sent me to the hospital for a CT scan and two hours later the surgeon popped his head into my exam room and told me that I would be having surgery in about twenty minutes to remove what looked to him like a burst appendix.

I called my wife and gave her the news, and she jumped in the car and headed on over to the hospital. The surgery went off without a hitch. The surgeon was able to do it laparoscopically, which meant that I was ready to go home on Christmas day.

I remember asking the surgeon how one developed acute appendicitis. He basically told me that for some unknown reason some feces moved into the appendix and cut off the supply of blood and nutrition to the appendix, causing it to swell up and eventually burst.  BTW, as it turned out, my appendix had not burst. The CT scan just showed a large mass of fluid, but it was still contained by my appendix.

I guess I should have been suspicious when the surgeon’s nurse called me on Monday and asked if we could move up my two-week surgical follow-up visit. We moved it up a week and I didn’t give it another thought.

I often take my wife with me for any doctor visits that have to do with surgery, but since this was just a routine follow-up, I went by myself. The surgeon entered the exam room with a smile on his face, which was normal for him. He was a happy, positive guy with a good sense of humor, and I really liked his bedside manner. Plus, he was a good surgeon, which isn’t always the case in a small town.

He greeted me and started talking about our previous discussion of how people develop acute appendicitis. And then he said that the cause wasn’t that well understood, but that in my case they knew exactly why it happened. “Your appendix had a malignant tumor,” he said, still smiling.

How does a person respond to that? I had no idea what to say, so I asked the obvious. “I have cancer,” I asked?

“Yes, you do,” he replied; his smile had disappeared.

He went on to tell me about how the pathologist had examined the appendix after it was removed and how he found a rather large tumor that spanned the entire width of the enlarged appendix. He went on to say that that, for my case, it was usual to follow up by removing the right ascending colon along with part of the transverse colon, because cancerous cells were present in the margin of the appendix where it met the colon.

The logical side of my brain was engaged for the remainder of the conversation, and by the time everything was said and done, I was on my way home to tell my wife that I was scheduled for surgery the following Monday to remove a third of my colon because I had appendiceal cancer.

To be honest, I don’t even remember telling her. My brain was still functioning, and I was still talking rationally, but nothing was sinking in. I mean, how the hell could I have cancer?! And what did that even mean?! Was I going to die? And how would I die? I mean, what would actually kill me if I died from cancer? Try looking that up on the internet.

I was dumbfounded. I could not wrap my head around the question, let alone the answers to the question. What did it mean to me to have cancer? At that moment it meant that everything I’d planned was now uncertain. And even though I didn’t know how to express it, it scared the shit out of me.