Post #662312 by kraken on Mon, Dec 24, 2012 12:07 AM

Part two---why I stopped donating blood for more than 8 years.

The problem started with lower intestinal disturbance: queasy,
soon gut churning, with ongoing diarrhea that my HMO just
couldn't diagnose; they dismissed it as "suspicious for ileitis".
Two of their gastroenterologists tried to give me colonoscopies
but neither could get the scope past my ileo-secal valve; they
both reported it too inflamed. Obviously this mystery ailment
disqualified me as a blood donor just then.

There followed over a year of treating me with any combination
of antibiotics that they or I could find that the scientific journals
reported as seemingly helpful for this class of mystery disease,
no matter how expensive. One antibiotic combination cost more
than $1500 a month and turned my urine red after exposure to
air, making me less than popular with friends when I spattered
a little on the rim of the toilet bowl. No treatment helped at all.

That's when I took my medical needs to another organization.
The first time I brought this problem up with them, they gave me
a CT scan and told me I seemed to have an ugly-looking growth
in my bowel which could easily be cancerous. By that time I was
desperate (unable to work much for well over a year) so when they
told me the most reliable way to confirm this was to cut me open
I told them to start cutting. The next morning they told me they'd
found a 3.5 centimeter carcinoid tumor on the flap of my ileo-
cecal valve, which they'd excised (along with some localized
metastasis) by removing a foot of my bowel.

Slow recovery from surgery, but problem solved! No recurrence
in more than 5 years! But blood donation rules around here, at
least back then, prohibit a cancer survivor donating blood until
5 years after his last treatment. That plus a few minor technical
obstacles, mostly to do with my hemoglobin level, brought me up
to November 2012.

PS--I wanted to save the foot of bowel, which even had my
appendix on it, to have it mounted by a taxidermist, but the
hospital staffers thought that was a really bad idea. I did acquire
a second navel out of this though. The way the incision was
stitched up gave one spot the appearance of being another navel,
about 4 inches from the original. This lasted for almost a year.