For the past 5 years or so I’ve made a pact with myself that I would go for a full medical checkup once every two years and a dental checkup once a year. I’ve so far kept to that but this year something happened that gave me something to think about.
The medical checkup I went for was a full body scan. I do everything from the usual blood tests to an ultrasound of my organs to even running on a treadmill to test my heart. It’s a very comprehensive test that takes half a day.
I normally pass everything perfectly fine minus the bordering high cholesterol levels and stuff like that. This year though they found something more.
In my ultrasound they found a cyst on my pancreas. It’s a small cyst but a cyst nevertheless than spans about 0.6cm. The doctor immediately recommended that I go to see a gastroenterologist and get it checked out. She said it was probably no big deal but best to do it. I followed instructions and went to see one a few weeks later.
When I sat down, the gastroenterologist told me it was probably no big deal but he wanted to do an ultrasound endoscopy to check it out. An endoscopy is when they put a tube with a camera down your throat to check out your intestines but this one had an ultrasound in it so they could put the ultrasound right next to the pancreas and get a good look at the cyst.
Now a lot of people have done endoscopies and an ultrasound endoscopy is more or less the same except that the camera head is bigger so it’s more likely to cause a sore throat or a little bit of discomfort post op. The doctor said I would most likely have to do this every year to monitor that cyst.
The thought of doing it one time was scary enough but the thought of doing it every year was something else. So I talked to my father who had to do the same thing 5 years ago and he said he regretted doing the endoscopy because when he talked to other doctors then they said
“What’s the point? We have cyst everywhere in our body, some which we don’t even know about and it’s not like you’re going to do this every single year”.
What my Dad does now though is a yearly MRI which isn’t intrusive.
My sister in law happens to be a doctor and I asked her what she thought about this whole thing. She said an ultrasound endoscopy is the textbook thing to do after discovering something like that but an MRI might do the trick too.
She said one thing that hit me though. She said
“This is why I never do full medical checkups because you sometimes find things that are not serious but that forces you to check it up and do things that stresses you out or makes it more serious”.
I was like “What? Really? You never do medical checkups?”.
And she clarified that yes she does do her blood tests and all but she won’t ultrasound her abdomen for no reason unless she’s facing some symptoms.
I can’t help but think perhaps she might be right. Sure in theory regular medical checkups are the most prudent thing to do but it’s not like they catch everything that is wrong with you all the time. Sometimes they catch the smallest things and you worry about it. Perhaps the best way to know if something is wrong with you is to trust the way we are built by nature. When we feel there is something wrong with us, then we know.
Now that I know about this cyst I’m going to have to go see another doctor for a second opinion and do at least an MRI. I’ll be spending money but it’ll be a lot less than the RM4K I was quoted for the ultrasound endoscopy.
So what do you think? Is ignorance bliss? Or would you prefer to do annual medical checkups and find out everything that might potentially be wrong with you.
Timothy Tiah – Co-Founder of Colony, Kuala Lumpur Co-Working Space