The Importance of Early Screening: Steve’s Colon Cancer Story

So, 2019, I realized it was time that I go see my family doctor because I'd been having some symptoms, digestive issues andwhatnot, and at the time I was thinking, geez, maybe these are early signs of colitis or irritable bowel syndrome or something like that. And so I thought, time to go see my family doctor and see what he has to say. 

Immediately he kind of wrote it off and said, you know, you're young, I think what you've probably got here is just a case of food sensitivities. And from there I went about my life for another two years. 

As those two years wore on the symptoms kind of got worse, and I noticed they didn't always correlate with foods that I ate. And so I started to feel like there's probably something more going on here.  At age 48 I contacted my family doctor and went to see him and told him what was going on, and he said, OK, yeah, definitely time to send you for a colonoscopy.

When I came out of the colonoscopy and was awake and the doctor came over and he put his hand on my shoulder, that's when he broke the news to me, and he said that, Steve, unfortunately I found a tumour and it was quite large.

It was so large, in fact, that I couldn't even finish the colonoscopy because I couldn't get the scope past it. He said, i've taken biopsies but I'm positive it's a large cancerous tumour.