"cancer … I Refuse to Give it a Capital Letter!"

Life can be great when it’s a nice steady routine of things to do and people to visit and meetings to speak up at. In some ways, it can become a little mundane, predictable or even frustrating.

However, sometimes life can suddenly suck you into a rapidly changing situation, where everything happens so fast, you have to just hang on and go with the flow.

In late 2016, I found a small amount of blood in my poo & placed myself on the bowl-screening programme, by simply phoning up for the kit.

Now life has thrown me a cancer and I was diagnosed in early 2017. The cancer is in my bowel and it’s serious, said the surgeon, who was determined to get rid of it for me, in fact he was very confident he could do it. However, not without risk, that being a 9 hour major operation that has an added risk because I’m over weight, over 60 years old and I have type two diabetes. All of which lifts the odds from 5% to 7%, or in other words, normally 95 people out of a hundred get through this successfully, has now gone down to 93 people out of a hundred. After which, I would be left with having to wear a colostomy bag for the rest of my life, but I should be cancer free again.

All the hospital staff at both the, City Hospital and Queen University Hospital, Nottingham, has been exemplary in the way I have been given the information, which is quite a lot.

They realised being loaded with lots of information it was hard to take any of it in at the time, so they gave me a booklet on each subject as they spoke to me, then went on to the next bit of information, with another leaflet or booklet. Which meant I left loaded up with booklets all in order of the information they had given me, it was a simple matter of sitting down in my own time and read each of the hand outs that helped me remember and understand the information on support and what I need to do to prepare myself for the operation.

My son and his mum came to all the meetings I have had with various nurses and doctors. My son, who has a learning disability and autism, can be very blunt at times and he is curious too. Talking with the consultant surgeon, who was to operate on me, explained what the procedure is by using a diagram of a man’s inners, pointing out the area he will be working in.

I was then given an appointment to see an anaesthetist, to have my pre-op done and to be given a definite date of the operation.

I had my first major operation on 16th February 2017. Never had a knife on my body, never been in hospital before, never even been in a hospital bed before. This was my first ever operation, it was for bowel cancer.

My experience was quite frankly awesome, I was scared, confused & utterly out of all my comfort zones. However, I was introduced to an NHS system, at Nottingham University Hospital, known locally as Queens, which simply thought of all my needs & dealt with all my fears. It was pain free & utterly efficient & very effective indeed that my every need from dealing with things on the ward to dealing with things in my private life, affected by me being in hospital, was dealt with.

From the surgeon & his team to the consultants & the nurses, they all had a professional approach backed up with their vast experience of dealing with Patients & their needs.

After a month in hospital, I went home, and today I am happy to say I have been discharged & cancer free, placed on a 5 year watch with 5 planned visits over the next five years for checkups.

My advice, get checked out early, it saved my life.