Colonoscopy again?

[walter32]

I had a colonoscopy done last year with no findings - all good.

I had it done after more than a year of severe fears of Colon Cancer after my uncle had died from it.

I thought I saw blood every time I had a bowel movement - even though there wasn't blood. But I'd confuse small pieces of tomato etc for blood and the uncertainty drove me mad.

After the colonoscopy, which showed that all was good and normal I decided to stop checking my stool. It was a year and a month ago.

Then in the past two weeks I've had two incidents of seeing blood in my underwear.

In both cases the "placement" of the blood would suggest that it came from another location than the ******* (excuse my language) - like maybe a scratch somewhere on the buttock. But it's still been so close that I couldn't know for sure.

(The spots of blood were quite small - not severe in any way).

After the first incident of seeing this blood 1,5 weeks ago I then started checking my stool again and I'm pretty sure I haven't seen any blood in the actual stool so far.

I also talked to my doctor and he says he can schedule a colonoscopy for me if I see blood on more than one occasion.

My dilemma right now is whether or not to insist on him scheduling the colonoscopy so I can know for sure.

Since I have had one colonoscopy with OK results a year ago and - even more importantly - since in the past 1,5 weeks I haven't seen blood in the actual stool but only in the boxer shorts on two occasions, I'm leaning more towards the explanation that the blood must have been from a scratch or a spot somewhere on the buttock (although any visible scratches can't be found).

My question is this though: If it was Colon Cancer how often would there be visible blood in the stool after the first finding of blood?

Or to put it in another way: How many days, weeks, months of not finding blood in the actual stool will it take until I can safely rule out that the blood in my boxershorts came from something else?

I know - from googling - that bowel cancer means intermittent bleeding. So my fear is that the blood came from that - and that the reason I haven't found blood in my stool since then is because it only comes intermittently.

On a related note - how can I even be sure there's not blood in the stool. My dr says that I wouldn't be in doubt if I saw it - but the problem is I AM in doubts. I know for sure that there's not a lot of it - but how can I rule out that any piece of tomato isn't instead a little drop of blood? Do you know what I mean?

[Fishmanpa]

When I was undergoing cancer treatment, I had a neck dissection, lingual tonsil removal and biopsies. I was scheduled to have the staples removed from my neck 10 days later. The night before my appointment I awoke choking. I went to the bathroom and hocked up a blood clot the size of a quarter and thus began bleeding. I knew within an hour I was in trouble as the bleeding wasn't stopping. I ending up a few hours later at the ER at Johns Hopkins 2.5 hours away (taken by ambulance). By the time they got me into surgery, I had lost about a pint of blood, most of which I swallowed as the open wound was down in my throat.

A day later while I recovering I hit the bathroom and evacuated. There was absolutely NO mistaking the fact that I was passing blood. Black, nasty and beyond nauseatingly smelly. You would know 100% if you were passing blood!

Positive thoughts

[Frankie123]

I have had several colonoscopies because I have had lots of polyps in my colon. However this was only every three to five years as the doctor said that colon cancer develops quite slowly because first the polyps have to grow and then, occasionally and only occasionally, they might turn cancerous. So if you had a colonoscopy a year ago then I doubt any sort of cancer would have developed in that time.