Puil's sigmiodoscopy

Puil showed some signs of colon cancer. This happened right after our failed PGD cycle. For a long time he did not take many signs into account as he thought they are because of our difficult times.

I will not go into details but if someone has a gentic predestination for colon cancer than it can be quite scary. After a visit to the GP he got to see a specialist who promised that his colonoscopy will be brought forward to December. The specialist however was not convinced that his symptoms are coming from polyps in his bowel. She beleived it is just a coincidence of having irritable bowel syndrome and hemorrhoids at the same time.

After a long silence Puil started to chase things up. His appointment showed up in the system as cancelled. He was not particulary worried as he himself is certain that his symptoms were caused by having more polyps than usual from all the stress we had and after he returned to normal most of the polyps disappeared as well.

It is possible, it happened to his sister, Valerie. Valerie had so may polyps at her second ever colonoscopy that the consultants wanted to remove her bowel there and then at the age of 18. But Valee did not agree. At her repeated colonoscopy the hundreds of polyps disappeared and since then she has an acceptable number of polyps every year. Acceptable for someone with FAP I mean. A normal healthy person should have no polyps in their bowel at all.

Puil made another phone call just to see what is happening. We became quite good in chasing things up thanks to all the PGD experience. It turned out that his colonoscopy got changed into a sigmiodoscopy and his next colonoscopy due in May was now pushed over to next December. Sigmiodoscopy only surveys the lower third of the colon but it is a much easier procedure according to Puil. I should take his word on this as I don't really want to test them myself.

Anyway his results came back clear. Am I worried? Yes I am. Seeing no polyps in one part doesn't mean anything for the rest. And he always has some polyps. Always. Every year. How could there be none this time? There was no mention of the suspected hemorrhoids as well. The original reasoning for having a sigmiodoscopy instead of a colonoscopy was that the hemorrhoids can be proven and thus the presence of larger polyps can be outruled.

Luckily however we got lots of lovely reassuring e-mails from our support group members telling us that things usually do not happen that quickly and when they do happen the NHS is wonderful. So here's hoping.