What is colorectal cancer?

I could try to write about what cancer is, but it's defined at www.cancer.org , and I'm not much of a science writer.

I personally think of it as cells in chaos. Cells normally work in our body towards a common good; towards life and growth. Cancer cells work towards a common bad, and they are driven to kill you. When you find out you have cancer, you are in a race against an irrational killer. It doesn't matter if you have a stage I or stage IV cancer, it can kill you. Luckily for me colorectal cancer moves slowly. One of my doctors said that he thought that I'd had cancer for about seven years before I caught it. Because colorectal cancer starts as small pre-cancerous polyps in the colon / rectum, it is easily prevented by regular colonoscopies. Before I showed symptoms of cancer, I didn't even know where my colon was. Do you? It's a portion of your gastrointestinal tract. It's the last portion of your digestive system and connects to your rectum. All I knew about colonoscopies was that Katie Couric had had one on national television. Now I know that they are life saving. If I had had a colonoscopy at age 30, my cancer may have been caught as a polyp, swiftly removed, and therefore... no cancer. My hope is that colonoscopies become standard for people age 25 on, and not only for people aged 50 and older. Colon cancer at age 30 shouldn't be a death sentence because it wasn't caught in time. Colonoscopies are not complex procedures, you're put to sleep and someone sticks an itty bitty camera up your butt to look around. No big deal. Wouldn't it be great if health insurance companies paid for them in people age 25 and up. Something to work on :)

Introduction

I was hoping to have more of a concrete idea of what to write about, and statistics, when I began this blog. But now I just want to start writing it, so hopefully I'll have statistics for you soon. I was diagnosed with two stage III colorectal cancers one week following my 36th birthday. Technically, rectal and colon cancers, but I generally told people that I had colon cancer, more because I wasn't ready to process the fact that I had two cancers. At first it seemed odd to me, and to others, that someone my age would have colon cancer, a cancer more generally associated with people age fifty and beyond. But as I moved forward, I discovered that there were many other people in their twenties and thirties and forties with colorectal cancer, and they were being diagnosed at late stages, because like me, they didn't know what the symptoms were, and weren't getting colonoscopies, because of their young age. So this blog is an entry point for me, to try to inform others about colorectal cancer, at all ages, and to work towards developing a more formal, informative website, and materials. Eventually I'd really like to find a way to get younger people in for colonoscopies. Treatment for colon cancer is expensive, and it seems the insurance companies would end up saving money by funding colonoscopies in people younger than the current recommended age for them, instead of having to pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to treat them. More than that, it would save lives.

So this is just a start point. But stay tuned for more....