After two weeks of fasting treatment for chronic pancreatitis, I lost a lot of unnecessary fat from my middle-aged, overweight body, and my muscles tightened up thanks to the muscle training I did while hospitalized. The pancreatic stent completely eliminated my abdominal distension and back pain, so after I was discharged from the hospital, I felt better than ever. I could move lightly when playing soccer, I hardly felt tired when hiking with my wife, and I followed the doctor’s instructions and completely abstained from alcohol.
Last 40 years, I had only a few days a year without drinking alcohol, but now I am abstaining from alcohol and feeling good, I thought my chronic pancreatitis must be improving. Replacing a pancreatic stent is scheduled at the end of November, but I decided to ask the doctor to remove the pancreatic stent that is currently in place and to observe the condition without the stent for a while.
I was scheduled to go to the hospital for a preliminary examination by the doctor one week before the pancreatic stent replacement at the end of November, but two days before that, I developed a fever. After being discharged from the hospital, I not only abstained from drinking alcohol but also from eating out, but I thought that the fever was probably caused by attending a year-end party for the first time in a while the day before I developed a fever.
The night I developed a fever, my stool had turned white, and when I looked up the cause of white stool on the Internet, I read that eating too much fatty food can result in whitish stool, called steatorrhea, so I thought that eating too much fatty food at the drinking party was the cause.
The next morning, my fever had gone down, and on the day of the preliminary examination by the doctor, my temperature was normal and I was able to go to the hospital without any problems, but when the doctor looked at the results of my blood test at the hospital and the color of my complexion and eyes, he told me that I had jaundice and to be admitted to the hospital as an emergency hospitalization.
The nurse at the reception desk also told me that she was worried because she saw my face and that I had jaundice, but I didn’t realize that I had jaundice at all.
Now that I think about it, when I looked at my face in the mirror in the morning, I thought I was quite sunburned, but it seems that it was actually jaundice. Furthermore, stool turns white due to bile duct dilation, which is the cause of jaundice, so my symptoms seemed to be typical jaundice caused by bile duct dilation.I was rushed into hospital, and that evening a stent was inserted into my bile duct at the same time as replacing the pancreatic duct stent, and I was subsequently admitted to hospital for treatment.
Even though I was hospitalized, I did not feel unwell at all, and just like the last time I was hospitalized, I was spending my days in a healthy manner, doing muscle training every day and walking around the ward. My daughter and grandchild who live overseas came to Japan the day after I was hospitalized, and we were planning to go to Disneyland together the following week, so I asked the doctor if I could be discharged in a week, and he approved. However, the day before I was discharged, the doctor told me that there was a high possibility that I had pancreatic cancer. During my last hospitalization, he said that even if it was pancreatic cancer, it was stage 0, but the doctor explained that it was a little larger than that, and that if it had metastasized, the stage would be raised. Having hardly done any proper research on cancer, I vaguely thought that if that was the case, it would be stage 1 cancer, and if it had metastasized, it would be stage 2, but even before that, I had the feeling that the doctor might have made a mistake, so I couldn’t take his words at face value. My doctor was still young, and although he was a hard worker who worked from morning to night, he was not very good at talking to and explaining things to patients and their families. When I was admitted to the hospital, I asked him if the pancreatic stent could be causing the bile duct dilation, but he was silent and did not reply. This made me distrust the doctor. If I had properly investigated pancreatic cancer, my symptoms would have been typical of a pancreatic cancer patient, but I was not feeling sick at all, so I began to distrust the doctor before seriously investigating pancreatic cancer. I wanted to get a second opinion, and if it was cancer, I wanted to consider transferring to another hospital, so I consulted my best friend from junior high school, who is a doctor, and he recommended the other hospital, where his classmate from medical school is the head of the gastroenterological surgery department. I decided to get a second opinion there. To get a second opinion, I needed a document summarizing my test results from the hospital where I was currently staying, and my doctor kindly prepared the document for me. After I was discharged from the hospital, I went home with the document. Since the envelope containing the document was not glued, my wife and I looked inside and we were surprised. The diagnosis was stage 2 or stage 4 pancreatic cancer, which means there is a possibility of metastasis to the liver. I had only researched the fact that stage 4 pancreatic cancer has a 5-year survival rate of just over 1%. I didn’t even have the basic knowledge that once cancer metastasizes, it becomes stage 4, no matter how small the original cancer was. Although the young doctor had told me during my hospital stay that there was a possibility of metastasis, I never thought that I would end up with the dreaded stage 4 pancreatic cancer. I was surprised when I first saw the words “stage 4” on the document. With a faint hope that perhaps the young doctor had made a mistake, and that perhaps it was not pancreatic cancer but the pancreatic stent that was causing the problem, I went to the new hospital to get a second opinion, but the head of the gastrointestinal surgery department there also said that he thought the young doctor’s diagnosis was correct, and that it was not a problem with the pancreatic stent, but pancreatic cancer with the possibility of metastasis to the liver.This diagnosis came from an experienced doctor, someone who my best friend had given me the thumbs up as an excellent doctor, so I was able to fully accept that I had pancreatic cancer.
Looking back, the young doctor at the first hospital had explained exactly the same thing to me, but he rarely looked me in the eye when he explained, and sometimes he was at a loss for words, which is probably why I no longer trusted him. The head of the gastrointestinal surgery looked my wife and I in the eye as he explained the harsh diagnosis and what kind of treatment we had going forward in a straightforward and calm tone. My wife and I both graduated from the same university as the chief of the gastroenterological surgery department, so partway through the diagnosis we started talking about our mutual friends, and in the end we left the room laughing, but I think it’s rare for a patient to be able to leave a room laughing after being diagnosed with possible stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Perhaps it was because the doctor’s diagnosis made sense to us and we felt we could trust him. This experience made me realize how important communication skills are for a doctor.