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 :)
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Maya, if you had cancer for 7 years and didn't have a colonoscopy, how did you catch it? What were the symptoms that drove you to finally have a colonoscopy?
ReplyDeletei started having horrible stomach pains and trouble going to the bathroom. i had the pains for about a year and kept putting off going to the doctor about it because i didn't want to take the time off from work. at one point my doctor asked me if i had any symptoms she should know about and for a moment i thought i should tell her, and then decided against it. finally, one night i had the pains all night long, and called my boss the next morning to say that i was taking a day off to take care of an ongoing medical problem. i went to see my doctor who referred me to get a colonoscopy. the pain got so bad before the colonoscopy that i had to have a manual exam a few days before it was scheduled. that's when the gastroenterologist (sp?) felt the cancer. he confirmed with an emergency colonoscopy the next day.
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