Health scare teaches that prevention matters

I'll never ignore Katie CouricKatie Couric again.

I haven't posted here for the last couple of days because I had a health crisis, the type that seems to occur a lot more nearing age 60 than nearing age 30.

To put it delicately, about 48 hours ago, I found that I was bleeding from a place you don't really want to be bleeding from.

Not that anyone wants to bleed from anywhere, but some places are worse than others.

After procrastinating for about 12 hours -- hey, I was only bleeding some of the time -- I got into the car and drove myself to the emergency room. I have health insurance, actually pretty good health insurance, but when you're bleeding, the emergency room seems like the logical place to go.

I spent about 10 hours there. I had a blood test, I had x-rays, I had a four-hour potassium drip and finally I had a CAT scan. After about nine hours of mentally trying to prepare myself for the worst, it was something of a relief to be told that the presumptive diagnosis was that I had colitis.

I got an hour of an antibiotic drip, a couple of prescriptions and was sent home around midnight with the instruction that I needed to follow up with a colonoscopy as soon as possible.

I'll be 60 next month and I've never had one. Pretty stupid, huh? I did have a sigmoidoscopy, which is far less invasive, five or six years ago, but I had sort of been resisting the idea of a colonoscopy.

Well, now that I have spent the better part of a day considering the possibility that I might have colon cancer, I won't resist any longer. It's a proven fact that the No. 1 factor in this country in determining who survives cancer and who doesn't is whether they have health insurance.

Well, just having health insurance doesn't help you a bit if you don't use it.

Katie Couric is right.

Screenings matter.