nyazers' Journey with Adenocarcinoma, Anal Cancer

I had them for about 2 years and then went and got a colonoscopy at 17... They didn't find anything, so I let it go even though the bleeding continued. Then at 19 I had another colonoscopy and that's when they found the tumor.

Oh no, I have cancer, and now I have to medically withdrawal from school... I was pretty mad about that.

I took Xeloda and of course I was one of the "lucky" people that got the chest pain side effect along with it... Felt like I was having a heart attack! It took forever to figure out how to get it to stop, in the end the doctors just lowered my dosage of the chemo pill... It was not fun to say the least.

For the most part the radiation didn't effect me as much as they thought it would. It's messed up my uterine functions, burnt by butt, and made me really weak and tired, but considering my age I did pretty well.

I actually haven't done the surgery yet... and it's not a colostomy. I'm getting an ileostomy because I'm having my colon and rectum removed... My uterus as well, but that's just because it may spread there eventually and we don't want that. Anyways, this will happen sometime in April. EDIT: I've had the surgery and it's been around 4 months since the surgery. I healed up rather well, with all the complaining I did in the hospital they let me go after 6 days. The ileostomy isn't hard to deal with at all, I actually kind of like it! I've jumped the bandwagon that many of the young crohn's patients I know have, and named my stoma - Worm. Anyways, my backside is still in the process of healing, it's gonna take a while, but that's understandable, but it's way better than it was when I first got home from the hospital. Everything else is fine though!

After my surgery, which put me in remission, my oncologist along with his fellows thought it'd be best if I did chemo a second time to make 100% sure that they got everything out that they could get out and in hopes of preventing a new cancer from popping up. So I was scheduled to have 6 months of a "trial prescription" of Oxaliplatin and 5FU. And I say trial because I'm not allowed to do the pump because I get heart spasms (similar to a heart attack) from the normal dosage of 5FU, and Oxaliplatin pretty much renders me bed-ridden for 4-5 days of the week. So I'm on a lower dosage of both so I can at least have about 3-4 days of my week where I'm able to get up and complete school work and house work with the help of my friends Zofran and Compazine. Anyways, I just started month 3, so about 4 more to go!