The Start of a Long Journey (Imported from benvscancer.com 13AUG15)

13 August 2015
July 1, 2015: A supper like any other. A cheeseburger with my wife and four kids. Unlike others though, I couldn’t swallow the cheeseburger. I choked on it, and coughed half of it back up in the sink. My dad, who has Barrett’s Esophagus, said “You’d better get that checked out.” Two weeks later, I had my diagnosis.
After I cleaned up from supper, I went upstairs and messaged my doctor asking for an appointment (Hooray for the online patient portal!). The next day I had one for the day after that. I went into the office on Friday morning at 7 (right next door to work, so I wasn’t even late) and he set me up for a barium swallow at the local hospital the next Monday morning. I went to work, asked for the time off, and prepared for my routine exam.
Monday came, I did the barium swallow, they could see that I was having trouble right then. By the way, (TMI alert!) you poop out heavy poops for a week after that. Little white things that sink right to the bottom of the bowl. Once the doctor there looked at these results, he scheduled me for an endoscopy for that Friday. It looked like I had Barrett’s too.

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