It was August 1, 2011. To most it was any other day, but for me and my wife, it wasn't just another day. You see, for the previous week and a half, I was admitted to two different hospitals at that time. The reason I ended up in the hospital was because after doing my workouts for a couple of days, during the workouts, I just didn't feel right. I had just completed one round of P90X so I knew the workouts shouldn't be as difficult as they were for me for two nights in a row. I was feeling weak, really fatigued and just plain tired. I also noticed that I was extremely out of breath and my heart rate was WAY above normal. Even to the point where I could workout for about five minutes and then need to literally sit there for another ten minutes just to recover and catch my breath again. The first night this happened I thought to myself that I just needed some rest. So I went to bed early that night and woke up feeling pretty good the next morning. Later that night I had Plyo X and started my exercise when I started to feel the way I did the night before. I stopped my workout about ten minutes in because I just couldn't do it.
The next morning I woke up and told my wife that I needed to go to the doctor to find out what was going on with me. We got to the hospital and they did some blood tests, an EKG and other tests to see what was going on with me. I told the doctors that that morning, I noticed I had dark stools (Sorry about this part). So they checked me and confirmed that I was bleeding internally. Based on that finding, they admitted me to the hospital. The next day they scheduled me to have an endoscopy. The results from the endoscopy showed that I had some sort of "growth" where my esophagus meets my stomach and that growth was what was bleeding. As part of the procedure, they took a piece of the tissue and sent it for a biopsy. Because the local hospital couldn't do anything to stop the bleeding, they decided to fly me to Presbyterian hospital in Albuquerque, NM. I arrived in Albuquerque in the evening sometime and got checked in. They scheduled a second endoscopy and Presbyterian confirmed what the local hospital found...a "growth" of some sort. This time though, they stopped the bleeding and took another tissue sample to send to pathology.
I stayed in the hospital over the weekend while we waited on the results of the biopsy. During that weekend, I really wasn't worried about the results of the biopsy, but that was a pretty long weekend just due to the fact that it was spent in a hospital room.
August 1, 2011...what started as an ordinary day, didn't quite end that way. My doctor came into the room around 2:00 PM with a somewhat concerned look on his face. Even though I didn't realize it until afterwards, I should have known it was something serious. He came in the room, closed the privacy curtain, and sat down at the foot of the bed. He then told us that they got the biopsy report back and the growth was malignant...which meant, "You have esophageal cancer."
To be continued....
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