It is not the hurricane that has kept me from blogging this week. I have friends and relatives in Galveston, Houston, and Beaumont. But our house is out of the path of the storm. We will get some rain, but little else.

No I have had a trauma of another kind - one that relates in various ways to the Blood Type Diet. A few weeks ago when I had my annual physical, all went well until my doctor found blood in the routine stool smear. He admitted that false positives are common, but because my mom has had polyps removed and my grandmother had colon cancer, and I was over 50, he said I was having a colonoscopy.

So I wound up in the office of a specialist who sneered at the idea that eliminating wheat and dairy from my diet had ended my GERD. Perhaps I should have fled the office right then, but I doubt I could have found a specialist with a different opinion - perhaps just one who was more polite about it.

I followed the prep procedures exactly because I wanted this to be over fast and easy. I woke up from the anesthetic to hear the doctor say he had found and removed one small polyp but had found nothing alarming. I was sent home with instructions to eat whatever I felt like eating. I slept all afternoon, and ate some of my favorite foods - meat and vegetables for dinner.

Sometime in the night things started to go wrong. I was restless and achy. I was running fever. I called the office in the morning and reported a 101.5 temperature to the nurse, but she wasn't particularly concerned. However after lunch the doctor called. He wanted me to come in.

After poking and listening, he said, "I have the lab report back already. You know I removed a polyp? Well it is benign. But it wasn't a polyp. It was something vascular. I am concerned that your colon might be perforated. I'm going to put you in the hospital."

I listened to this with horror, found myself in the car on the way to the hospital, and the next thing I knew I was being stuck with needles. They did a CT scan that was incredibly painful. Thankfully the CT scan showed no perforation.

I wanted to go home, but the doctor wanted me in the hospital overnight. I was too tired to argue. More in my next blog.