Coming to the Clinic – Part 9 – and the winner is . . .

If you read last Wednesday’s blog, you may be wondering which colon screening test I opted to take. My choices were Colonoscopy, Cologuard or FIT. (If you didn’t read last week’s post on this topic, or if you totally forgot what it was about, you might want to revisit it here.)

First, in case you don’t know me, I may not be the poster child for good health and fitness, but I’m only a few pounds overweight, I don’t smoke or drink alcohol, I very rarely eat red meat, I get a reasonable amount of exercise, and I am really working on getting enough sleep. And back to my eating habits? I pretty much consume the Three C’s. Cheerios, chocolate and cookies. I know. My bad.

But with all that in mind, I really am at very low risk for colon cancer. I did have one uncle who was diagnosed with it in his old age, so that’s really all I have going against me. With all that said, hey, folks, I still had my colon screening. So, remember that. No matter how low-risk you are, screenings are important and recommended for a reason.

I did the FIT test last year. Probably the easiest screen to do, but also needs to be repeated every year. This time around, I decided to try the Cologuard. Slightly more complicated to collect, but good for three years.

So, one day, a week before Christmas, my square Cologuard box came via UPS. It sat on the kitchen counter for a few days, amongst the tins of candies and cookies, before I realized that this was not the time of year to deal with this. I put the box in my home office, waiting for the holiday dust to settle. 

Plus, when the Cologuard people called me a few days later to see if my package had arrived and if I had any questions, they reminded me that there was a time element in me getting my specimen to them. Between the weekends and the holidays, there wasn’t a lot of time to get this thing delivered.

Then, New Year’s Day evening, just when I thought that I can deposit my sample in the little plastic container, I was hit with the stomach flu. Seriously? Yes, a couple day of diarrhea and my colon was cleaned out enough that I should have gotten right in for my colonoscopy.  

Instead I waited until the following Monday morning and was able to drop my perfect specimen into the plastic jar. Got it labeled, sealed it up, got it ready to take to town for drop-off on my way to work. In a near blizzard. I really did not want to mess this up, somehow, I would get my Cologuard box off to UPS that day.

I’ll save you from the whole story, because it was rather convoluted (and stressful), but in the end when I finally got the box to the store which sends out UPS in our town, I almost broke down in tears when I saw an identical box on the counter. I pointed it out to the woman working there and said something like, “send mine with that one.” She looked at the two boxes and was like, whatever. I really wanted to set my box down next to the other one (I really wanted to take a picture of them together!), thinking, my poop has a partner to travel to the lab with.

I’m starting to think that I will try the colonoscopy next time just to see if it is that much fun.