You Endure Cancer
The Young Shouldn’t Have to Endure This
Six years ago, I was operated on for rectal cancer, and I have been recovering from it ever since. Cancer isn’t a one-night stand. It’s a lifetime relationship with dysfunction. However, it’s hard to tell others this, especially if they haven’t had a brush with mortality. When your body or mind has been altered by illness, it changes your perspective and your goals in life. When I was diagnosed with cancer, I didn’t ask “why me,” but “how the fuck did this happen?”
I had a GP who cautioned me against having a colonoscopy at 50 owing to my heart disease. A blood test would suffice. When my bowel habits changed at 54, I was my father’s caregiver, and so I put off concerns for my health. When he died a year later, I developed early-onset cataracts and couldn’t see blood collecting in the toilet bowl. Each new symptom, like profound fatigue, I ascribed to grief rather than blood loss. I was working under the assumption that my heart attack at 42 gave me a hall pass from cancer until much later in life.
But symptoms have a way of accumulating like late payment notices until you can’t ignore them. In 2019, after another year of worsening symptoms, I went for a colonoscopy that discovered cancer. I was lucky I did.
My cancer was advanced, but it still could have been much worse. After all, I am able to refer to myself in the present tense. After my operation in March 2020, which amputated a section of rectum and colon, the pathology report listed my cancer as Stage 2B, as it had grown outside the membrane wall but had not yet metastasised to another organ. Hopefully, radiation treatment mopped up most of the errant cancer cells, floating like milkweed on the wind, in my lymph nodes. However, even five years on, the oncologist orders yearly CT scans, as he isn’t convinced the cancer is done with me.
I didn’t need a temporary ileostomy because my tumour was located neither too high nor too low in the rectum—the Goldilocks location. But I never returned to normal, because no one ever does after rectal cancer. At my hospital discharge, I asked one of the surgeons who assisted in my operation, “What should I eat?” “Anything but McDonald’s.” As if I had never done it before. The advice was glib and misleading. However, as a physician once said to me, “They’re surgeons, not doctors.”
Nothing was the same after it for me. Now, I spend as much time on the toilet as I do walking—and I walk two hours a day. The radiation treatment overcooked my bladder, causing urgency issues that have left me with unhealthy, interrupted sleep patterns. The after-effects of rectal cancer have dislodged self-esteem and replaced it with dysmorphia. And yet, I am thankful that at least I got this cancer when I wasn’t younger and a caregiver.
Others aren’t as fortunate. The young—those in their 30s and 40s—are developing rectal cancer in unprecedented proportions. It’s killing them in larger numbers too, because their symptoms are written off as IBS or hemorrhoids. With public healthcare and the social safety net in decline, the future for those with cancer, rectal or otherwise, is grim.
Cancer is something you endure rather than survive. Our culture likes to deny suffering unless it has an acceptable, time-constrained story arc. We are defined by what we live through, and those of us living through this or other misfortunes must band together to change the narrative. America—or anywhere—doesn’t need to be great again, just compassionate.
The piece above was written because April is Rectal Cancer Month.
Thanks for reading and supporting this Substack. Without your loyalty, I don’t know where I’d be. You have certainly kept both my father’s legacy going and the wolf from my door.
The last few months have been difficult. New subscriptions have slowed, and some long-time readers have had to step away because of the cost-of-living crisis. April has been slightly more optimistic because of a small but welcome royalty payment of £100. Hopefully, May and June will be more promising—but I have to get there first. Also, very shortly, The Green and Pleasant Land will be sent to my dad’s old publisher for consideration. It already has a small, boutique publisher willing to print it, but to maintain his legacy, the largest reach is preferable.
I’m starting my rent appeal earlier and offering yearly subscriptions at 40% off. Ten new subscribers will cover much of it. My subscription rates haven’t changed since 2021.
