OPINION
When I began bleeding, I knew things must be bad. There was only one way to find out how bad.
It was like any other Wednesday afternoon, except that I had cancer on my mind, and possibly in my body.
I had woken at 6am and in lieu of breakfast had consumed three litres of liquid laxative, then spent the majority of the morning running to the toilet. But my physical discomfort was as nothing compared to my existential dread.
A few weeks earlier, I had discovered blood in my stool, an event with a range of potential causes, but one that overpowered all others, growing and metastasizing in my head and making it difficult to think about anything else.
We’re looking for reasons not to send you for a colonoscopy, the doctor said, but he proved unable to find any, even with a well-gloved finger, and so it was that I was added to the waiting list for a procedure described on the Ministry of Health website as “a specially trained health professional putting a thin tube into your anus (bottom).”
He was careful with his words, but I understood that what had just happened was that I’d moved several steps closer than ever before to a diagnosis of cancer. I knew there were still other explanations and there was therefore no point freaking out, but it turned out I didn’t have as much control over my freaking as I would have liked.
I received a letter notifying me I was on the waitlist. It read: “If you have been given high priority, you will be seen promptly and if you have been given a routine priority we aim to see you within the maximum time of 4 months.”
Soon after that, I received an email with an appointment date that was six weeks away, which, I couldn’t help but notice, was very much sooner than four months.
What comfort I was able to derive from the situation came mostly from the fact I didn’t fit the profile of the typical bowel cancer sufferer. I’m fit and healthy and 46 years old, and I understood bowel cancer to be an old person’s disease. But then, two weeks before my appointment date, I was assigned to interview America’s Cup legend Dean Barker, who discovered blood in his stool four years ago, went for a colonoscopy and was diagnosed with bowel cancer. He was, at the time, fit and healthy and 46-years-old.
I am not a religious or even spiritual person, but, given the stakes, this felt a bit too coincidental to be funny. I hadn’t told anyone at work about the blood in my stool or the colonoscopy or my cancer fears, so why had the universe, and more specifically my editor, assigned me an interview about these very subjects at this very moment?
As I sat in an Auckland cafe listening to Barker tell his story, it was hard to avoid mapping it onto my own. The similarities seemed too eerie. Had I been directing the scene in a movie, I would have ordered it cut on grounds of implausibility.
I had hoped to hear that the symptoms he’d presented with were different from my own. Specifically, I hoped that the small amounts of blood I had found in my stool a few weeks ago paled in comparison to what he’d found four years ago.
When I asked him, he said: “There were little bits of blood, but nothing where you go, ‘Holy hell, there’s something really wrong here’.”
At that point I started to think: “Holy hell, there’s something really wrong here.”
I stepped up my vigilance and began examining all my bowel movements using my phone flashlight, willing the results to be a clean and uniform brown, but they rarely were.
That phrase, “little bits of blood” began to haunt me. I noticed other symptoms I hadn’t noticed before experienced discomfort in my abdomen; I struggled more during exercise; I looked paler than usual.
There was also a noticeable uptick in bad omens from the natural world: A crow flew overhead while I was driving; the black cat population in my neighbourhood seemed bigger than usual; fantails seemed to follow me everywhere. I told myself these things were coincidence, or confirmation bias, but that didn’t change the fact they were there.
In the days leading up to the procedure I became increasingly anxious. The day itself dawned heavy and significant. My wife drove me to the clinic at 1pm. My bottom was raw, my insides empty. We drove by Annabel Langbein’s house, where I’d once eaten her delicious cheese scones with lashings of butter. I tried not to think about it.
The clinic was unbelievably beautiful, like a luxury boutique hotel, flooded with natural light, covered in glass and elegant narrow-gauge cedar panelling. The lobby was chock-full of leather furniture which I had been enjoying for only a minute or so when a nurse approached, smiled warmly, introduced herself and said, “I’ll be admitting you today.”
She led me up a beautiful staircase and along a gorgeous hallway to a light-filled changing room, where we sat and talked for a few minutes before she handed me a cotton robe and a wicker basket for my clothes. It felt more like I was preparing for a relaxing spa treatment than the insertion of a camera in my anus.
She told me I would be given light sedation and would be able to watch proceedings on a screen. I told her I would prefer heavy sedation and no knowledge of proceedings. She said I should pass that information onto the doctor. I knew I would be too ashamed to do that.
She asked if I had any questions. My voice was a little shaky. I asked when I would get (cancer) the results. She told me that if a biopsy was needed, it would be sent for analysis, but that the doctor would be able to tell me what he’d found immediately afterwards.
I entered the procedure room and greeted the doctor and two nurses.
Because of the environment and because my time with the nurse had been unhurried, I imagined engaging in a few moments of anus-related banter before getting down to business, but instead, everything immediately began happening at great speed.
The nurse asked me to lie on my back, my anus over a pad. Within seconds, two tubes were blowing something up my nose and a needle was sending something up my arm. Seconds after that, I was lying on my left side with my knees drawn up and my bottom exposed. I felt a reduction in anxiety generally and a tube being placed in my butt specifically.
I had thought it would feel invasive and unpleasant, but instead I observed it with the detachment of an outside observer, although I remained fully conscious. On the monitor in front of me, I saw the rushing pinkness of my insides and noticed occasional snapshots appearing. I wondered, surprisingly non-judgmentally, if they were tumours. I could feel movement inside me, but I didn’t experience it negatively. I assumed I would fart on the doctor at some point, but I never did.
I was shocked by the speed of it. It was over so fast. I remember feeling relieved, all the anxiety of the previous weeks melting away, but I can’t remember why. Had the doctor said everything was normal? The drugs were stronger than I had anticipated.
A nurse wheeled my bed into a recovery room, where Seal’s 1991 hit Crazy was playing on the sound system. I lay in a light stupor, drifting around the edges of consciousness, deriving great pleasure from the stream of 20th century classics, which also included Fly Like an Eagle and Stand By Me.
I could have stayed there for hours, but a nurse soon appeared with my clothes and led me, wobbly-legged, to a pleasant light-filled annex, where I sank into a leather armchair, next to which was placed a chicken and cranberry sandwich and a plunger of hot coffee.
I was nearly finished the sandwich when the doctor appeared again and ushered me into a consulting room. The relief I had been feeling melted away and all the worry of the past few weeks rushed back in. My life course was about to be decided by whatever words were about to be spoken by this person I had only just met.
Everything shrank to a point focused on his mouth and slowed right down. He opened his mouth and, finally, after all the time there has ever been and ever will be, he spoke. They’d found no tumours, no polyps, nothing malevolent at all. The blood in my stool, he said, was probably caused by internal haemorrhoids, which would eventually settle down on their own.
Life was good! I was alive! All the symptoms and omens had been nothing more than the combination of some haemorrhoids and an overactive imagination. The darkness that had been so visible for the past few weeks immediately disappeared.
I thanked him. I loved him. I returned to the armchair and finished my sandwich. It tasted better than I remembered. I texted my wife to tell her the news.
It had been a great day. Sure, I’d had a month’s worth of bowel movements in a morning, but the procedure itself had been easy, pleasant even, and now I was relaxing in a leather armchair with some tasty food and coffee, and my life would go on as if nothing had happened.
But what if something had happened? I found my mind drifting back to Dean Barker who, four years earlier, after undergoing the exact same procedure I’d just been through, found himself sitting in a room just like this one, but with cancer. As he put it, there had been a fork in the road, and the path for him was the wrong one.
But there had also been many other forks in the road for him before then: Ones in which he’d failed to look at his stool and therefore never noticed the blood, or had noticed it but thought nothing of it, or had figured it’d come right eventually.
Bowel cancer is one of the most treatable cancers there is, so long as it’s detected early, yet it kills as many of us each year as breast and prostate cancer combined. Dean Barker is alive today because he paid attention to his poo and when he saw something was wrong with it, he went to the doctor and decided, yes, he would get a camera in his anus (bottom).
It’s easy, it’s free through the public system and it could save your life. At the very least, it could give you – as it gave me – the certainty you’re not dying, and you can’t put a price on that, although you can put a price on a chicken and cranberry sandwich. It’s $7 from Countdown.
Every month, 250 New Zealanders are diagnosed with bowel cancer and 100 die from it. Bowel Cancer New Zealand’s Move Your Butt challenge runs through June, encouraging all New Zealanders to take up a fitness challenge and get sponsored to raise both money and awareness of bowel cancer.