Last week was my wife, Anna’s birthday. Given that last year’s celebrations were derailed by me getting diagnosed with bowel cancer,, I was determined to make things special this time around. Mission accomplished. We had a lovely time.
What I wanted to do here is share a picture of the card I bought for her, but she’s already bloody thrown them all away. So here, instead, is a graphic I found that bears the same slogan. It leapt off the shelf because, in my case, it’s a very true story.
With that in mind, it feels as good a time as any to write something I’ve been meaning to put out there for a while.
This, my friends, is the story of my diagnosis.
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WARNING:
The following contains unfiltered and fairly unpleasant detail about my use of the toilet. If that’s not for you, maybe don’t read on.
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I’m not really sure when it began. But, for a period of weeks, probably months, my toilet habits changed. I was going more frequently. It was softer. Bittier. It almost felt like it was taking four or five attempts to produce what I’d normally deliver in one sitting.
At the same time, though, Frank was having a few issues with upset stomachs and digestion. Anna, as always, was vigilant of his needs. She would take him to the doctor, they’d say it was nothing to be worried about and would pass, and I lived vicariously assuming the same was true for me.
As we moved into the early weeks of summer, I was conscious that it had been a long time since I’d done a ‘normal’ poo. Then blood started to appear. Only a few spots at first, but enough to take notice. And yet, I still didn’t read the signs. I convinced myself that it had just been caused by my ongoing digestive issues. That I’d been going to the toilet so frequently that I must have just irritated the skin.
With the benefit of hindsight, it feels so stupid. I wasn’t entirely naive to the chance it was something sinister, but I was relatively young, and felt shielded by the idea that “it’ll never happen to me”.
As summer went on, though, that comfort blanket became increasingly threadbare. August came and Anna and Frank went to Ireland, leaving me in Birmingham. Suddenly, with the chaos of a busy home replaced by the silence of solitude, there was space in my head for nagging thoughts to creep in.
Despite this, as blood continued to appear in greater quantities, I continued to ignore the obvious. Anna and Frank came home. I said nothing. I did nothing. But the anxiety was growing.
As we approached the end of summer, it was time for our family holiday to Italy, and my symptoms were continuing to worsen. The worries, now consuming me, were beginning to show. I was irritable. Snappy. And then, stupidly, I derailed the whole trip by crashing our rental car, an incident that I still believe was borne out of a dark and distracted state of mind.
What followed was a few weeks of turmoil and disagreement with the car hire company, who reneged on the collision damage waiver and delivered a bill running into thousands of pounds.
It was, in the end, covered by my very generous insurers, but the issue had commanded all of my attention for a while, and I continued to ignore my impending health crisis.
At this point, many of my stools seemed to be made up of almost entirely blood. Every visit to the toilet resembled a massacre, and the possibility of bowel cancer began to fleetingly enter my thoughts. Given the fact that my dad had died from it a year previously, it feels like I should have taken those fears more seriously. Genuinely, I can’t explain why I didn’t.
Still reluctant, for some reason, to go to the doctors, I did the worst thing possible when you have medical concerns: I did an internet search of my symptoms. Only, in this case, Doctor Google appeared very keen to impart the best case scenario.
Of the umpteen signs of bowel cancer, blood in my stool was the only one I had. Tiredness? No more than you’d expect living with a four-year-old. Lethargy? I was feeling as fit as I had in a long time. Weight loss? I wish!
Even the type of blood I was passing didn’t seem to indicate a serious diagnosis. Tar-like and dark, apparently, was the sign of cancer. Mine was liquid and bright red, which pointed to something else: haemorrhoids.
So, with some degree of embarrassment, I took that diagnosis as fact, ordered some Germoloids from Amazon, and set about self-medicating.
While the treatment offered a small degree of improvement, the problem was still bad enough that I was concerned. Apparently things should have cleared up within 2-3 days. I was at about 2-3 weeks.
But I continued to bury my head in the sand.
At this stage, I’d still told nobody about my concerns. Mercifully, though, Anna’s perceptive nature had kicked in. She’d noticed the ever increasing frequency of my visits to the toilet. Her keen sense of smell was being triggered more often. The kicker was when she spotted a trace of blood.
She gently suggested a trip to the doctor a couple of times, which I stupidly continued to resist. By early October, she forced the issue and made me go.
My doctor is one of those folks who is incredibly hard to read. As I relayed my months of symptoms, all the while being apologetic for wasting his time when it was probably nothing, there wasn’t a flicker of reaction on his face. Having considered everything I said, he told me he was ordering a testing kit, then we’d go from there.
It arrived a few days later, with a return addressed envelope for “The Bowel Cancer Screening Unit”. Seeing those words was a wake up call. Quite suddenly, it felt like, actually, this could be quite serious after all.
It came as no surprise when the test did show the presence of blood in my stool, and I was quickly booked in for a colonoscopy to examine things further.
By the time this came around on 8th November, I was still telling myself it was probably nothing but, at the same time, I knew it had to be something. After all, I couldn’t go on shooting blood out of my arse several times every day.
The colonoscopy was as hideous as you might imagine having a camera shoved into your large intestine to be. After what felt like hours, they managed to get the camera the entire way around my bowel and… nothing.
I felt a wave of relief, but was still riddled with confusion as to what the bloody hell (literally) might be causing my symptoms. They’d nearly completely withdrawn the camera when, there on the screen, it appeared.
My tumour.
It was so close to the rectum that the camera had initially passed it by on entry. But there was no missing it on the way out. Jesus Christ, it looked horrendous. Just a yellowish mass dominating the screen. Have you ever seen footage of a ‘fatberg’ in a sewer? It looked a bit like that.
“Don’t worry, it’s just magnified, it’s not as big as it looks”, whispered the nurse, sensing my panic. But I knew.
As I was wheeled into the recovery room. I could hear them calling Anna, telling her to come in and pick me up. Because I was nowhere near ready to leave, dressed as I still was in a surgical gown, I knew they were calling her in so I had somebody with me when they imparted the bad news. I wanted to tell her “don’t bring Frank”, but I still hadn’t been reunited with my phone.
Eventually they arrived, Frank ran into the room with his trademark boundless energy and beaming smile. How exciting it was to pick up daddy from hospital! Only, very quickly, the nurses were suggesting he stayed with them for a few minutes so mommy and daddy could have a quick talk with the doctor.
We were ushered in, and the doc confirmed what I already knew. It was cancer. He knew it just from looking at it. But, what he couldn’t tell us was how advanced it was. If it had spread. If I could die. We needed to wait for the biopsy results for that.
I was quickly booked in for CT and MRI scans so they could learn more, but ultimately, I was left with an agonising ten day wait to learn the severity of my prognosis.
We stumbled out of the room in a daze and found Frank playing on a computer with the nurses, delighted that he had been allowed to share their biscuits and chocolate. I plastered on my gameface (something I would get used to doing) and off we went. The guilt that I was disrupting our happy family life was already unbearable.
The timing was rotten, not only because Anna’s birthday was just a few days away, but also because I was about to spend a week on stage playing the lead role in a play.
The following morning, I arrived for our technical rehearsal, breaking down as I told my director the devastating news. I decided not to tell the remainder of the cast, which later I would come to regret.
In the play, there was a dramatic moment in the first act when my character, who had been the subject of a murder attempt, bravely asserted his defiance. The speech ended with me bellowing “It’s all a game and if I die, I die”. Only this time, I couldn’t get the words out. It felt real. Poor Holly, my opposite number in the scene, looked bewildered as I collapsed in tears. It was then that I had to break the news to my fellow players.
As much as I felt like I didn’t want to continue, in the end, I decided the show must go on. Looking back, my week on stage was the distraction I needed to keep me sane as the anxious wait for my prognosis went on.
A few days after taking the final bow, it was finally time to visit my consultant to get my biopsy and scan results. Mercifully, of all the scenarios bouncing around my head, I received one of the better outcomes. There had been no spread, they felt confident it had been caught relatively early and, thank God, my treatment plan was curative.
That’s not to say the path ahead was easy. My tumour was fairly large at around six centimetres in diameter, necessitating the radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and ultimately the surgery that followed.
As I look back now, I’m in sheer disbelief at my lack of urgency and my reluctance to get checked out.
I was always the sort of person who never went to the doctor and never wanted to cause a fuss, but in this case, I think I was just scared of the truth. It’s not that I didn’t believe it could happen to me, I just didn’t want to believe it. But now I understand it’s better to know what’s really going on than to live in fear of what might be.
There are moments when I wonder if the path might have been easier, the treatment less intrusive, if I had just gone to the doctor as soon as I felt there was a problem. On the flip side, I’m so grateful that I had somebody who cared enough to make sure I sought help before it was too late.
I say all this just in case it resonates with anybody. If I can help just one person to seek help if they think they might need it, then that’s good enough for me.
Ultimately, the lesson here is to listen to your body. But, if you can’t do that, just listen to your wife instead. You might live happily ever after.
You know you might. You really might.
Tom Parker. 