MSI Press Blog

  Earlier, Cancer Diary reported on the death of Kirstie Alley due to colon cancer. Now another well-known person has died from it: Pelé.  Carl Leaver , MSI Press typesetter and co-founder, died of Cancer of Unknown Primary ; however, his oncologist suspected that it started as colon cancer (though, typical of CUP, the colon was clean by the time CUP was diagnosed at advanced Stage 4). Carl had skipped his colonoscopy, not with a great deal of thought but just because he did not want to be bothered with it at the time. Advice to everyone: be bothered with it! Read about the symptoms of colon cancer and issues of colonoscopies HERE . There is also a good deal of information about colon cancer at Carl's Cancer Compendium (cancers are listed alphabetically). Click HERE for more Cancer Diary posts. Click HERE for more posts about colon cancer. 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 ...

  Colon cancer continues to be better understood -- and findings show that we can do some things to prevent it. Not always, not with certitude, but definitely in some cases, colon cancer may be avoided or delayed.  I worry about our son CB. As Carl's son who is the spitting image of his father, likes the same things, including foods, and as a mentally challenged individual fights any changes to what he likes, he is, I worry, a candidate for colon cancer -- or some other kind of cancer. Carl ultimately had five kinds before he died though death came swiftly after diagnosis. As a Charge Syndrome adult, CB cannot be safely scoped. No colonoscopies mean no early detection. So, his gastroenterologist, dietician, and I are left to try to manage his diet wisely, which, of course, he fights -- but we keep at it.\ What are some of the things we have learned? Check the out here: I’m a cancer dietitian — here are 13 easy ways to lower your risk for colon cancer Nearly Half of Cancer Deat...

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 prett...

   54-year old Jason Maman put off checking out the reasons for his stomach pain for a year. It turned out to be stage 3 colon cancer. Read the article here .  This is a bit different from the delayed diagnosis described in last week's (May 13) Cancer Diary blog post. In that case, the patient knew something was wrong; it took too long for doctors to take her seriously and to get an accurate diagnosis. Carl , too, put off getting a diagnosis for something he thought was just stomach pain . He consulted "wisely" (right?) with our daughter who had had her gall bladder removed years earlier when he thought it might be his gall bladder. He decided to just monitor it for a while and see if it got worse. He adapted his food intake for gall bladder management. It did not work. To his defense, this occurred as covid was winding down, and doctors in our area were not seeing patients in their offices, just telehealth -- and his long-term doctor had left when the pandemic started to...

  People talk about “screening” as if it were a moral duty — something you simply do . But what if you can’t? What if your anatomy, your airway, or your medical fragility make the “routine” colonoscopy more dangerous than the cancer it’s meant to prevent? That’s not hypothetical. It’s real life for some of us. Can Colon Cancer Run in a Family? Yes. Colon cancer can cluster in families for two reasons: Shared genes — inherited mutations like Lynch syndrome or familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) dramatically raise risk. Shared environments and habits — diet, microbiome, inflammation, and lifestyle patterns that echo across generations. When a doctor says “colon cancer runs in your family,” they’re not just talking about DNA. They’re talking about pattern recognition — the way illness repeats itself when biology and circumstance intertwine. When You Can’t Have a Colonoscopy For most people, colonoscopy is the gold standard. For some, it’s a genuine threat. If your airway is unst...

  I recently came across an interesting article about sneaky signs of colon cancer. Considering that colon cancer and the threat of colon cancer plagues our family, I found this article useful and summarise the list here: Sneaky symptoms of colon cancer A change in bowel habits, such as more frequent diarrhea or constipation. Rectal bleeding or blood in the stool. Ongoing discomfort in the belly area, such as cramps, gas, or pain. Bloating, gas, or changes in bowel habits. More serious symptoms like bloody stools, significant weight loss, or fatigue may occur. For other Cancer Diary posts, click  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 CCC is expanded ...