In this record of illness, I have used the real names of the hospital and the doctors. We did not exchange written permission, but the doctors gave me their verbal consent. They have not checked the text, however, so I cannot deny the possibility of misheard words, mistaken assumptions, or memory errors. If such things appear here, the responsibility is mine alone, not that of the hospital or the doctors.

This account consists of eleven pages. You can move between pages by using the pagination under the title, or the previous and next buttons, "<" and ">". The button at the upper right takes you back to the contents page.

I emailed my wife at lunchtime on September 10, 2013. I was at the Japanese Red Cross Medical Center, on the second day of an overnight medical checkup.

The day before, my blood sugar had already been found to be abnormally high. Then, during an abdominal ultrasound that day, a shadow was found in my pancreas. It was still too early to know what to make of it, but I followed a very bad feeling and sent the message first.

Afterward, a doctor in the health management department told me to go to internal medicine. There I was told to wait for a doctor specializing in the liver, biliary tract, and pancreas. Her name was Dr. Yukiko Ito. Looking at the ultrasound image, she told a nurse, "Arrange a CT scan immediately." Then she turned to me and said, "This image is not enough. We will take a CT. The sooner the better. Please wait a little longer until the images are ready." It was a short conversation.

When the CT results came back, I was called in again.

I was shown images with a shadow in the head of the pancreas and atrophy of the entire pancreas. Perhaps I imagined it, but she seemed to have something difficult to say. So I asked directly, "Is it pancreatic cancer?" She replied, "The possibility is extremely high. Probably." She then explained that the CT result alone was not enough to decide on surgery, and that a biopsy would be essential. For that, I should be admitted for testing from the next day. It was fast. I accepted immediately.

From the 11th, tests would proceed on the assumption that surgery might be necessary. Everything would be confirmed on Friday the 13th, when the biopsy result came out. At that stage, I believed that the doctors' urgency to test me and prepare for surgery was not the worst possible scenario.

After returning home, I reported everything to my wife.

Pancreatic cancer was expected. If that was the case, there were two possible courses.

1. Perform pancreaticoduodenectomy, known as PD surgery. This would be possible if the tumor was limited to the pancreatic head and no metastasis was found. It was the only method with a possibility of complete cure.
2. Do not operate, but use anticancer drugs, radiation, and other treatments to hold back the cancer and prolong life. At best, five years. At worst, only a few months.

I also told her that the family would receive an explanation the next day. Later my wife said, "It was our household's 9/11." Indeed, it was serious.

I had always thought I would panic if I ever found myself in such a situation. But I was not in despair, and yet I was very calm. I think it was because the general information from the internet and the precise information from the doctor did not leave me in a vague "I don't understand" state. The situation was brutally simple: either zero or one. Another reason was that the cancer had been found early through a medical checkup. That fact gave me confidence that I had not treated myself as an exception, had continued to be examined, and had grasped the possibility of saving myself.

Later, as expected, cancer was confirmed, and surgery was performed ten days after the medical checkup. Let this page serve as the preface to a record of treatment that I had been told would be harder than the surgery itself. I hope to add the continuation little by little after the operation. Of course, I trusted the Red Cross hospital and its doctors completely, and believed the operation would succeed.