Bowel Cancer
Out of the blue in January 2022 by sheer chance I happened to notice some blood on some paper after I had been to the loo. It seems very silly to me now, but at the time the first thing I did was check my fingers for cuts. In my defence I had been in my garden shed earlier in the day, used a saw and other sharp tools. It wasn’t entirely unreasonable to think I had sliced my finger off and due to my high pain threshold simply not noticed. ( The high pain threshold statement is pure lies I assure you).
Once I checked all ten digits were intact a strange realisation came over me.
Oh no, blood in my poo is not good, especially at my (no longer youthful) age of 57. I got on the phone to the doctors immediately, and I mean immediately… it was the next thing I did. I can’t emphasise this enough, take action without delay. Call your GP and they will give you a quick exam which is painless and a FIT kit to take home to do a stool sample.
Now let me get one thing crystal clear…..Just because you have blood in your poo DOES NOT mean you have cancer. There are many other conditions, piles to name just one, that may present with blood. BUT it might be, so whatever you do not sit back bury your head in a bucket of sand and do nothing.
Imagine you don’t take action and in 5 years when your bowel is blocked by a tumour and you have to to go to A&E as an emergency case. They do the surgery and lucky you, you survive it. When you wake up they tell you you have bowel cancer which they have sorted by removing most of you bowel, but unfortunately it has spread to your liver lungs and kidney’s. You are going to die in a very short time.
You then learn that if you had taken action at the first sign of blood it could have been cut out before it had chance to metastasise. You look at yourself in the mirror for the first time after surgery and realise you, whuile technically still in the land of the living, have literarily died of embarrassment. Please don’t be that person. PLEASE.
If the test comes back postive then you will be fast tracked to see a consultant or specialist who will arrange for some more tests. I talk about these in my You Tube videos see the intro movie below.
These tests are more or less painless and to be honest a breeze. The secret is to not do too much research. Just do enough to be informed and leave it at that. If you go down the “research rabbit hole” you will undoubtedly find the horror stories of the most unluckiest people in the world whose pain was horrific and everyhing that could go wrong did go wrong. This is a recipe for disaster, it will destroy your confidence and make you so anxious before any tests let alone the surgery.
Surgery is mostly done laproscopically ( key hole) sometimes robotically and of course a proportion are done by opening you up. Mine was laproscopic and I recovered quickly and was out of bed the second day and out of the hospital within 4 days. Recovery at home for a few more weeks. After 4 weeks or so I felt completely back to normal. I had an ileostomy pouch to manage, but as I explain in my You Tube videos this does not have to be a big deal.
Overall, in my most humble opinion, the important thing to remember is that your mind will dictate how you feel to a large extent. You need to immediately accept things are the way they are and not waste emotional energy. Dont fall into the crowd who say….“Oh, but why me” “this is so unfair” But I’m so fit how can this happen to me?” Where is the justice in the world, I’m a good person ” etcera etcera. Once you do this, believe me, being positive about your cancer diagnosis is child’s play.
Check out my YouTube channel where I have made a video diary of sorts. I will try to make it funny here and there over time as I progress with treatment. It will be a bit of a filmmaking journey to as I am mostly a stills photographer and video is still fairly new for me.
