Prologue
In the summer of 1974, I was 20 years old. I was admitted to the Hospital of St. Raphael (now part of Yale New Haven Health) for surgical repair of a Bochdalek hernia. (Since most such hernias manifest symptomatically shortly after birth, how mine came to be diagnosed at such a relatively late point in my life is another story entirely.) After cutting me from under my left nipple around to under my left shoulder blade, the surgical team fractured one of my ribs and inserted a jack to open my ribcage enough to allow them room to repair my diaphragm with a synthetic mesh.
At that point, they realized they needed some place to put the stuff that needed to be put into my abdomen (where it belonged) from my chest. So, they made another incision from under my sternum to just above my navel and took the stuff out. When my diaphragm was repaired — and since they were in the neighborhood — they removed my spleen, which was distended, and my appendix, which was unnecessary. Then they put the remaining stuff back into my abdomen rather willy-nilly.
There are two implications from that: (1) Unlike most folks, my colon doesn’t have ascending, transverse, and descending sections. Rather, it’s more like a labyrinthine maze. (2) Because of #1, I learned during my Welcome to Your 50s Colonoscopy that the procedure can’t be performed on me because the scope can’t negotiate the maze. As a result, my primary-care physician (PCP) relies on Cologuard for my intestinal cancer screenings.
Now we’re all caught up.
The Story
In October of 2024, I went to my PCP for my annual Wellness Visit. (After you get old enough to qualify for Medicare, your annual physical exams magically become Wellness Visits. You can’t even see it happen.) During the visit, my PCP told me I wasn’t due for another Cologuard exam until November of 2025. Nevertheless, shortly thereafter, a Cologuard kit showed up. Because of what my PCP told me, I wasn’t in any hurry to do anything with it.
Within a couple of weeks, I started getting text messages, purporting to be from my insurance company (?!), contending they needed to have my kit returned ASAP. Because I’m me, I ignored them. The messages persisted. After a while, I caved and submitted the kit, entertaining the always-present possibility that I’d been missing something.
Then, one day last week, Anne got a call from some Life Line Community Healthcare, a third party neither of us had ever heard of. The caller, a woman, gave Anne a phone number that started with 833 to use to return the call. The caller reported my Cologuard test had been irregular (we assumed it wasn’t a pun) but couldn’t specify the irregularity: “It could be hemorrhoids, blood, something else, or a false positive.” Lovely.
Not liking the way the whole thing smelled (no pun intended), I called my PCP’s office. After getting transferred to three or four different people, I was finally reassured that the office had received no Cologuard results for me, I wasn’t due for another Cologuard kit until November, the number for the organization that called began with 800, not 833, and the scam was just one of many about which they’d been hearing, including blood and urine tests.
Epilogue
After talking with the PCP’s office, I went downstairs to tell Anne the good if disarming news. We breathed a collective sigh of relief, saved from the scam and not having to worry about another Cologuard encounter until November. The following day, Anne had lunch with a friend, told the friend our Cologuard story, and the friend told her about this article. Welcome to the brave new world.
I don’t know if we’ve reached the bottom of the barrel. But if we’ve gotten to the point that ne’er-do-wells are attempting to scam people over their bodily secretions, we’re close enough to worry me.
Good grief.
