Just in from Bowel Cancer UK’s 25th Anniversary do. At Downing St. Proud to be there. Grateful to Samantha Cameron for hosting (yes, I know, but hey, they get the people in, right??)
Lovely to meet Shelley’s sister Leah’s oncologist. (Leah died of her well-challenged* bowel cancer last year.)
I found it hard to hear people talk about the differences between a ‘sexy cancer like breast cancer’ and all the rest. I find it hard that cancer charities feel like they need to differentiate between themselves.
Sad too, to feel that ‘mine’ was perceived as a ‘sexy’ cancer, when for my wife and I it meant such losses (infertility not least among them) and it certainly wasn’t easy to have, and we know so many people who are not here because of their breast cancer, and yet …
BOWEL cancer (yes it is to do with the word) needs money, it really does. It finds it is not pretty in the world, in the shy, silly, easily-embarrassed world. It is EXTREMELY curable caught early. It needs to get that word out.
So. Here they are.
Go share, donate, give, make better. Thank you.
Bowel Cancer UK
* I’ve had cancer (surgery, chemo, radiotherapy), I do not do ‘battle’, or ‘fight’, or any of the other stupidly militaristic words – I’m a Buddhist! But challenge works for me, very well.
Not Writing But Blogging 
Great blog. Spot on! And so often people who have this cancer wait longer to have it checked out/treated simply because they are embarrassed. Sadly my uncle died for that very reason.
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I tend to the view that no cancer is sexy. My brother died last week of oesophageal cancer and he was eaten way by the end. An horrific way to die. We need to stop this awful disease whether we battle it, fight it, or challenge it.
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Yes. Thank you. And I’m very sorry for your loss.
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Yes Caren, the shyness is so damaging. X x
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Bowels and bottoms are not “sexy” and people may see the early symptoms as nothing to worry about. My brother had radiotherapy then surgery to remove a large tumour in his bowel at 45. As someone who is rarely ill he went to see his doctor early enough for it to be treatable – and the location of the tumour made it very noticeable.. He is now “clear” at 50. He has had to learn to live with a colostomy, but it’s a small price.
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it’s great your brother went early enough to be treated, and that he’s doing well, but I’m not sure living with a bag is a ‘small price’. At the time I was choosing whether or not to have chemo, some people thought my concern about becoming infertile due to chemo would also be a ‘small price’ given that the alternative (not having chemo and possibly having a recurrence/death) was such a major cost. I have to say that to those of us going through it, all treatment has some kind of price, and while being alive is glorious and I feel very fortunate compared to the generations of women (especially young women as I was) who had breast cancer before me and had no chance of survival, that survival came at a price and the price is very real. Not least that of having truly considered my own death in a way that was impossible before being confronted with my own mortality. Most medical procedures to do with a life-threatening illness come at some cost, and to negate that cost is, I think, to negate a very real suffering.
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