I’d like to talk excrement with you. And I don’t just mean this blog. Excrement is a very big part of our lives, especially when we get to a certain stage in our lives when we are invited to get tested for bowel cancer. My kit arrived this week and it’s very glamorous testing process, I can tell you.
To cut a short story even shorter, what happens is this. You catch a small ‘stool’ sample and scrape it with a small piece of wood and smear the contents onto what is called a hema screen. You do three of these and post them off to a laboratory and they test them for early signs of colorectal cancer. Without going into too much detail, I’m two thirds of the way through the process.
Having done this before, the wait between sending off the sample and getting the result can be a little worrying. Having said that, I am less worried about this one than my last test, which was the first one. Bowel cancer is one of the cancers which doesn’t always announce its presence until it’s too late. Having a regular test makes it more likely, though by no means certain, that if I am unlucky enough to have cancer I’d have a better chance of survival.
The first time the kit arrived, it sat on the mantelpiece for a few weeks. You know what us blokes are like. Then, a friend of ours developed bowel cancer and I could not do the test quickly enough. What a fool I had been. It could not happen to me. I’m a man and I am going to live forever. Well, that’s what I thought when I was younger. Far too many funerals have brought home the reality. None of us get out of here alive.
So the dignified process of taking a stool sample is an absolute necessity. But not for everyone. The numbers of those participating in bowel screening is astonishingly low. The figure in England is between 55 and 60% of people actually return their samples. In some parts of London, the figure is 33%. Imagine that. You will probably discover you don’t have cancer, but if you do the odds of your being successfully treated are far higher. I am actually looking forward to getting my results.
Something so simple can help you live longer. What’s not to love?
