Early Warning Signs
This post is about the early signs that were pointing towards something going on in my body that was not healthy; it is about detail to changing sensations in the body. The very subtle, yet persistent body shifts that are important to pay attention to. Let's talk about the stuff that is under the surface, the stuff we tend not to talk about.
I think part of it is this: if your body has always been functioning one way and then it starts to change, this is something to pay attention to regardless of your past history of being healthy. This is where my thinking closed in on me, once healthy, always healthy!
It was Christmas of 2014 when I first started noticing a slight change in my digestion. The awareness was very subtle, yet something inside me said, ‘there is something different with me.’ Changes can come at first, very quietly and then if we don’t listen to them, they get progressively louder.
And so it was, overtime I noticed a difference in the way my lower belly felt and a slight change in my bowel movements. There was a dim voice that was trying to get my attention and I did notice it, yet I did not do anything about it or bother to tell anyone. Why? It seemed so insignificant and perhaps because I have never had anything ‘wrong’ with me physically, I thought it would eventually pass. I also thought, maybe this has to do with menopause, yet didn’t bother to do anymore research around it mainly because I was absorbed and tired with work and day to day life.
Life always has hidden peaks & valleys...keep following the path until more is revealed
I’ve always considered myself a healthy person. I’ve exercised regularly and have been active with sports my whole life. Always cooked from scratch with organic veggies and whole grains. Wanting to feed my children the ‘cleanest’ foods, I was always mindful of reading ingredients on the food labels of what I was buying. I was the one in my family who didn’t smoke, was always looking for a natural alternative, and very little alcohol. I teach yoga and mindfulness to kids and adults and have a daily practice of both for myself. Anyone who knows me would never suspect anything would be wrong with me health wise and it never occurred to me that something terribly off balance was brewing in my body. You get the picture.
I continued to notice for a whole year more subtle signs of something not quite right. The feeling never left me that my digestion and bowel movements were not acting the way they usually did. At this time, I was 52 years old and my periods were becoming sporadic so I naturally thought all of these changes were part of menopause. I knew about hot flashes, intermittent periods, and intense hormonal related mood changes. I wasn’t having hot flashes, but my periods were not as regular as they had been my whole life. Again, because I have always been healthy, never in the hospital for anything other than childbirth and that was all natural, my thoughts never went to thinking there may be something really going wrong inside me.
Since discovering that I was not immune to getting a serious illness, I have read about many people like myself getting cancer: healthy and active, and yet this is also boggling the minds of doctor’s as well. Why are people with this profile getting cancer? Big question that I won’t go into here, but definitely worth exploring.
My work as an Upper School Social/Emotional Counselor with teens from ages 14-18 years old is a very stressful job. High schools have become pressure cookers for kids and teachers to constantly be performing at extremely high standards. The expectations that these students get top scores compared against world standards (I work in an IB World School) and are able to apply and get accepted into top Universities around the world has become an accepted & expected norm. The price that is paid though for this ‘norm’ is large. For many of the students and adults, it shows up in the form of: anxiety, panic, depression, self-harm, burn out, social isolation, exhaustion, and illness.
My world was a highly stressed one and it took everything I had and more to keep my own stress levels down. For me, this became another full time job after I left work. I started to feel like I couldn’t keep up, no matter what I did to help myself, I never was able to regain an inner vital force of energy where I felt re-fueled and ready for the next day. Each day, the layers of exhaustion became greater. It happened slowly over time and in this way made it hard for me to separate what was just work stress and feeling tired from what was this other different kind of tiredness that just never went away.
I started having thoughts of, ‘how can I get out of this?’ I didn’t know how to get off this fast moving escalator. My body felt weak, I had no energy to sit up straight as I worked. I felt like my spine could not hold me up anymore. At work, I sat on a pilates ball to help with my posture and even on the ball I found ways to slump as I worked. I began to realize that it had been so long since I felt deep energy. I started to wonder, is this what it means to be getting older, because if so, it sucks!
When I turned 50, both kids were now out on their own and so I naturally thought my life would get easier. Less laundry, cleaning, cooking, helping to coordinate family schedules, yet I found myself more tired, less time, and my exhaustion levels growing. What irony I found in this! I thought the ‘empty nesting’ would be a welcome break from the 20 year cycle of day to day parenting.
As I look back on this, I now wonder if the busy-ness I made of parenting became a distraction for what was going on inside me? Parenting is all consuming if we allow it. Our lives are easily taken over by the endless demands from the outside world and the expectations we place on ourselves to be a good, conscious parent. Living in an active flow between who I am as an individual and who I am as a parent, takes a great amount of awareness and is a discipline that one develops over time. This too, takes energy. When exhaustion becomes at an all time continuous high, it is very difficult to practice a discipline so demanding.
There is always a trail to find and a peak to reach
I think it’s important to have a picture of what else was going on in my life at the time leading up to my diagnosis because it was part of the whole picture that contributed to how I was perceiving my state of health.
About a full year later after first noticing something off with my digestion and an increasing difficulty with regular bowel movements, symptoms started to show up with more intensity. My energy levels were becoming less and less, it was really an effort for me to make dinner after working everyday and my interest in food was diminishing. Then it became hard to stand up while I was making dinner because there was increasing pressure in my lower abdomen and pelvic floor area so I found myself grabbing a stool to sit on while I chopped veggies and prepared food. This became a new nightly habit that I gave into. I thought it was a bit much that I physically had to sit down to find a pain free position to continue working, but again, I found a way to carry on with my daily routine. As soon as dinner was made and eaten, I was laying on the couch for the rest of the evening and then taking myself to bed.
I noticed I was losing weight and for most women that’s usually not such a bad thing. I thought, I could drop a few kilos anyway. As I go back through this in my mind, I’m wondering to myself, why didn’t I do something more at this point. Clearly, this was not my normal self and wasn’t this a clue that more was going on in my body that needed some help?
Yes, it was a big clue, however I had conditioned myself to plow forward, to just keep going without stopping to question too hard what I was doing. For so many years parenting, I think this approach is what kept me going for better or worse. I had an unconscious goal to be the best I could be, for my family, for my Self, that I wasn’t even fully aware of how much it was driving me. It is the subtle, unconscious patterns of thinking that get in the way of truly seeing the present moment and what is actually going on.
While the sensations of heaviness and pressure were increasing in my lower abdomen area, my stools were changing significantly and I started noticing small bits of red on them. I assumed the red was a bit of blood, but again it was so insignificant, I thought it was not something worth getting too concerned over. In fact, I started thinking maybe it’s hemmoroids because I had to start pushing more to have bowel movements. This again was highly unusual for me as I had never experienced constipation before.
You might be thinking to yourself reading this, why didn’t she go to her GP doctor? We moved to Switzerland when I turned 50 without kids. The pressure to get a doctor was off because I had no kids to take care of and again, what’s the rush, I’m healthy. When I did try to find a ‘Hausarzt,’ house doctor, they were always full. So, I never did secure a new doctor for myself until I was in an acute health crisis. Note to self, it is precisely when you turn 50 that health prevention really needs to kick in and it’s time to apply self care prevention!
I did go to a OB/GYN for a full check up in February of 2016 and she then referred me to a Gastroenterologist who I went to see in March. I decided after seeing both specialists that I would try taking some natural products for easing constipation for a while longer to see if the symptoms would subside. As I had no indicators or risk signs for colon cancer, I put off doing a Colonoscopy at this time.
I added more fiber to my diet and tried various products to help move food through the colon. Nothing really made a difference though. I started searching online about menopausal symptoms and came across A.Vogel’s health menopause site
Here I found out that constipation can be a real problem for some women going through menopause. I had never heard of this before and I thought to myself, ‘this is me!’ I’ve figured it out. This must be how menopause is showing up for me. I wasn’t alone with this discomfort and pain! Women had shared on the blog that Vogel’s Linoforce Granule’s were the only thing that had helped relieve their constipation so I found this product in our local health food store. I started taking it and it did help me. Finally, I had found something that worked. It wasn’t perfect, but there was some movement. This eased my mind for awhile thinking that I had found something to finally get me back on track.
I continued to go to work everyday feeling more and more exhausted and then one day, I got to school went directly to our nurse and said, “I can’t think, I can’t do this anymore!” I hit a wall and could not mentally function. My body was on some kind of altered autopilot, but when my mind went to mush, that was the breaking point for me. She immediately got me into see any doctor that would take me that day for a blood test. The next day, the test came back showing extremely low iron (Ferritin) levels, bordering on anemic. In one way, I was relieved to see it was low and this made sense as to why I had such a deep and unrelenting mental and physical tiredness and exhaustion. Right away, I received five shots of iron of 100mg each, two per week. After the first week I could feel my mental energy coming back a bit. I had some capacity to think and work.
By this time, the end of school is approaching and the focus turns towards finishing up school tasks and preparing for the start of another year. Going away with a group of students is one of the many things that happen at this time. This year, I was going with the boys soccer (football) team and three girls to Sri Lanka for 9 days.
My energy had continued to go downhill and I was concerned about how I was going to manage such a trip and be of any help to the group. It never entered my mind that I should drop out from the trip. I would find a way to get through it. I was chaperoning with two male colleagues who I knew well and felt supported by, however there were no female companions I could confide in if needed. On the trip, I found my role as ‘nurse and caregiver’ to sick kids was a much needed one as I handed out plenty of upset stomach pills and consoled those in pain. We all could relate to a feeling of joy when a clean and proper bathroom was available to us! I made it through the trip and loved being back in Sri Lanka with a wonderful group of students who I was able to get to know better. School finished and the summer break was an open road before me. We had planned holidays with open schedules and mostly local. I was hoping this would be my opportunity to rest, heal, and get my energy and body back to ‘normal’ functioning.
August approached and after 6 weeks of being outside, doing some biking and hiking, feeling healthier than when I finished school, I was hopeful that upon returning, life would fall back into a manageable routine. There is a lot to do for School Counselors before the students arrive and even with great organization and help from colleagues, the stress levels can run high.
As soon as I returned in the first week, all of my previous symptoms came back only this time, full blown. I had so much pressure in my pelvic area and perineum, I physically could not stand up without a great deal of pain. My body was speaking to me loud and clear this time! There was no ignoring the signals. I immediately went back to the doctor I had seen earlier to get another blood test and a referral for a colonoscopy. It was obvious to me that whatever I had was not going away and now it felt worse. I had to find out what was going on and a colonoscopy was the first obvious exam to have.
The colonoscopy was painful for me. I’ve never had one before so I thought this was normal. I later learned that you shouldn’t feel pain and the recovery from having this done is immediate, unlike myself, where I had to sit at home for a couple of days recovering. However, still I was not worried that I might have cancer. It just never entered my mind. I’m also not the type of person who goes searching around on the internet to do self diagnosis so I waited for my follow up appointment with the doctor.
When I got back into the doctor’s office to go over my results, our school nurse and friend was with my husband and myself. I was glad she was there because when I was told that this black mass in my lower colon area was cancer, my mind went blank. It was in this precise moment, that I was suddenly flung into a new reality that was both terrifying and yet finally providing a direction for me. The start of new road opened up before me and as Saki Santorelli eloquently says, I had to "reckon with the challenge of taking back my life and the effort required to awaken to the fullness of this one life I have to live."
Having someone else with you in these doctor meetings can be invaluable. They can ask questions and then help move the process forward. Within a week, I had a Hausartz and a referral to an Oncologist thanks to our school nurse who was able to call around and find the best medical choices for me. I had no idea where to begin this process and it is friends like her that one needs when you suddenly find yourself in unknown territory.