Cancer Diary: The Toilet Can Talk about Cancer and More, But Do We Listen?
As with Carl, many people have "signs" of cancer that can be interpreted either as something else quite mild or dismissed entirely as just a bad day or maybe I ate something bad yesterday. Otherwise quite healthy people simply ignore them as an annoyance. (Before cancer, Carl was sick just one day in his life -- 50 years earlier he threw up, once, on the lawn, from unsuspectingly drinking stagnant water the day while carrying out his Forest Service employee duties, Seriously. Never again did he ever throw up even after three rounds of chemotherapy, but he died, healthy, from cancer!)
This is the insidious nature of cancer. Often, you just do not know you have it because the signs are so innocuous until it has taken over your body and is in the winner's circle -- and you have an incredibly difficult battle to get your body back -- and many people lose that battle every single day.
This is especially true of "toilet information." Change in bowel movement is pretty innocuous. Looser or less loose, what is the big deal? What we eat affects our bowel movements, so how do we know if something is a sign of something sinister? A consistent change might be a warning. So might an abrupt change. Since Carl died from cancer of unknown primary (though his oncologist was convinced it started out as colon cancer), while seemingly healthy, we do not know much about these signs -- and it is too late to ask him. If only he had had a colonoscopy -- which he deliberately chose to bypass, thinking his good health meant he was not at risk! Poor choice, for anyone! Get a colonoscopy, folks, regularly, starting when your doc recommends one.
Carl's experience, however, put me on alert. Not that I was not on alert already since I have Barrett's esophagus and thus at risk for esophageal cancer, another silent and rapid killer. So, when I noticed an abrupt change in bowel movements, I contacted my gastroenterologist, who knew that I was fairly well self-educated on cancer. The change started with huge, immensely painful hemorrhoids that ultimately burst in a bloody profusion that eliminate the pain, but after that I had constant diarrhea for several weeks. I reported it to my gastroenterologist. I was not due for another colonoscopy (previous one had been just fine, seven years earlier) for another three years, but he went ahead, just in case, and upped the schedule. He would do an early colonoscopy in just two months, when he had an opening on his calendar. In the interim, for my own sanity, I took a home colon cancer test -- and it turned out positive. So, instead of doing the colonoscopy two months later, my gastroenterologist did it two days later. He found three polyps, one of them pre-cancerous. Yes, caught that one! As soon as the gastroenterologist saw it, it was a goner! Now, I am on a more frequent colonoscopy schedule -- once every 7 years (instead of 10) with annual home colon cancer tests. It creates peace of mind. I have some way to proactively work at detection and prevention instead of reactively working to control potential colon cancer.
This article on toilet information and the signs of pancreatic cancer called to mind the fact that no just pancreatic cancer has these signs; they can be typical of a variety of cancers. You can read the signs of many kinds of cancer at Carl's Cancer Compendium on the MSI Press website.
Read more about Cancer Diary posts HERE.
Blog editor's note: As a memorial to Carl, and simply because it is truly needed, MSI Press is now hosting a web page, Carl's Cancer Compendium, as a one-stop starting point for all things cancer, to make it easier for those with cancer to find answers to questions that can otherwise take hours to track down on the Internet and/or from professionals. The web page is in its infancy but expected to expand into robustness. To that end, it is expanded and updated weekly. As part of this effort, each week, on Monday, this blog will carry an informative, cancer-related story -- and be open to guest posts: Cancer Diary.
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