A month since my last health update, I have some good news and some bad news. But first, a brief background... Summary borrows from my previous post on this issue: --- I've been dealing with abdominal pain for 8 months. It was intermittent and mild at first, but it gradually became worse. Then in January, it got quite bad, and became mixed with a few other symptoms in the same region. Some of those symptoms were worrisome, so I made an appointment to see a doctor. (I don't actually have a family doctor "GP"... I have to see the specialist I was connected to when I had my heart surgery last year.) He assessed a few things, then sent me for an ultrasound, a very cheap and easy test that can be done almost anywhere. A few days later, I spent the afternoon at the hospital, to get that scan done. The results were sent to my specialist, but it took weeks to get another appointment with him, at which point he informed me it doesn't appear to be a hernia, and referred me to a local abdominal surgeon. The surgeon finally saw me the other day, and asked a few questions about my family health history. Along with my symptoms, it points toward there being a breakdown in the lining of my intestines, causing normally beneficial gut bacteria to enter the abdominal cavity, where it causes infection and pain. My beloved grandmother suffered from that (aka "diverticulitis") in her later years. Apparently most of us do, especially if we make it past 50, but not everybody ends up having pain or dysfunction from it. Guess I lucked out? The surgeon booked me for a scope (I'll spare you the details but you can probably imagine), which will happen in about 3 months. --- Oh by the way, my freedom of information request did finally come back, but it was pretty boring: "No hernia found." I spent a whole afternoon getting that test done, and it only resulted in 3 words? After going through the heart problems and almost dying (again) in 2021-2024, I felt so positive about 2025. Just when I was finally making progress in life again, and getting back on track... this wants to derail things. And the slow/crappy healthcare system here certainly doesn't help. In fact, it just adds to the stress... and we should all know by now that stress is a huge killer. Yesterday was a bit rough, and I had a really nasty episode a few nights ago, but at the moment I'm feeling okay. That's good news. Oh and the good news I mentioned at the start? The surgeon says it doesn't appear I have cancer. That's good, but there's definitely something seriously wrong in my abdomen, so I won't really rest easy until I've got a definite diagnosis. "Yay, you don't have Ebola!" is always a nice thing to hear, but it doesn't get you much closer to an actual diagnosis, let alone relief of your problems, know what I mean? So I'll wait a few months for the scope, which will basically knock me out of commission for 3 days (prep, procedure, recovery). Which is a long time when you're a full-time father of homeschooled children, with a disabled wife. I'm going nonstop 14+ hours a day, every single day of the year, and I've been doing that for 6 years now. Not a single day off, no vacations, not even a dinner out. I've been on shift for 6 years straight. I am burned out. 3 months of suffering is a long time, especially after 8 months of it. But it was ignorable at first... not anymore. It hurts almost every hour of the day, sometimes intensely. And I constantly feel (for no reason) like I have to, well, visit the bathroom. So it not only hurts, it feels really uncomfortable, and distracting. Imagine the nastiest feeling you've ever had, when you did something really wrong to your guts and just about exploded... well it feels like that pretty much all the time. Sometimes all I can do is curl up, hold my guts, and groan. It fuckin sucks. I guess that's the bad news. I don't really understand how a person is just supposed to sit at home, no treatments or prescriptions or tests or anything, just a 3 month wait for a butt probe? Gee... I mean I don't want to sound ungrateful, but I put 10 years of my life into this healthcare system, and this is what it has amounted to? This is the care a person gets, in Canada, where the world believes we get first class "free" healthcare? So I probably don't have cancer, but my intestines have holes and are leaking bacteria. The good, the bad... where's the ugly? I guess the ugly is that I live in a part of the world where the system is set up to either profit off you or kill you. But I'm not giving up, and if there's some good health and happy times waiting on the other end of this REALLY long stretch of suffering and loss, it'll all be worth it. (purposely no formatting or images) DRutter