Warning signs are setting in...

It’s been a weird start to the week. The night between last Saturday and Sunday I was feeling off, simply could not find a comfortable position to sleep in. No extraordinary pain, but enough to keep me awake. Thinking that this was feeling not quite normal, not like a food poisoning or upset stomach. I called the weekend docker early Sunday and got a time to get a checkup a 9:00. Arrived expecting the usual circus of people at the emergency weekend dockers, but it was luckily not full and I got in straight away. The doctors did an examination of the stomach and got quite worried as he could feel a pulse coming from the exact spot where I had pain. Then things got hectic, the doctor called in an code on the phone and suddenly I was rushed in a wheelchair to the Emergency. Here I placed in a room immediately, two nurses lifted me on the bed all the while a doctor was beginning to ultrasound my stomach. Nobody had told me what was going on at this point, everybody was rushing, getting vitals and doing stuff. The ultrasound doctor was mumbling and talking to himself, when he finally announced: I’m calling in my senior colleague. She came down right away and took over the ultrasound work, after about 5 mins, she looked up: “Hi Daniel, so we are from vascular surgery department, the was a suspicion, you had a bleed from your aorta, when this happens we need to move fast. luckily this is not the case, your veins are looking normal and fine”. then she turned over to her colleague: “please tell the surgeons they can stop prepping”. At this time the clock just turned over to 9:20, so I’ve learned that if you need critical care, they system is in place. From here everything turned into a regular ER experience in Denmark, waiting, alot of waiting…

All in all I was in the ER for 9 hours, they went by fairly quickly, I was so tired after a night of no sleep, so finally being painfree kind of knocked me out. My dad and his wife came by with some food and offered a bit of comfort, but I was really not up for talking, just wanted to sleep. After a bit of time a docter from Gastroenterology came by to examine me, she was really puzzled that I no longer had general pain, but only felt it when pushed me on the specific spot on the stomach. She was mostly leaning towards discharging me. After a bit of back and forth they landed on doing an CTscan to get a clearer image of what was going on. I was not really feeling comfortable getting released seeing as I was sleeping in van. The van has heating and your not freezing, but at the same time, it’s really not great when you are sick. So I asked to be admitted, but they were already overbook, so she could not guaranty a bed.

The preliminary finding of the CTscan came in and to everybodys surprise it showed an abscess of 5x5x7cm. The preliminary were just that, no details on what the radiologist suspected it could be, just a crude description of what they saw. But seeing as they had no idea what we were dealing with, they admitted me for further scan and testings.

This was the real start to my cancer adventure…