MY HEALTH EXPERIENCE: JOSEPH HUNT:Early visit to the doctor would have avoided the trauma
THE FIRST indication that anything might be wrong was about November of 2006. I was 71 at the time.
I would be walking along somewhere out and I would have a sudden desire for a bowel movement – I would have to get to a toilet reasonably quickly. I went along with that for a while and I thought it must be something I was eating, too much of this or that.
I glossed over it, fool that I was. Because if I had gone to the doctor back then, I feel that I wouldn’t have had to go through the trauma that I have had to go through in the past few years.
That carried on into the following year and I went to Tuscany in Italy on holidays with my wife, in May 2007.
For the first time I noticed a bit of blood in my stool. But I came back from holidays, I still fiddled around and didn’t go instantly to get it checked out. I actually waited until about October of that year before I went to my GP.
I guess I wouldn’t face up to it, I think that’s what it amounted to. I was saying to myself, ‘maybe it’s piles’. I was looking for an excuse.
I finally went to the GP and he made an appointment for me to speak to a surgeon, who in turn sent me for a colonoscopy. I got that done pretty quickly and I’m a public patient, I was very lucky.
When they had done the test the doctor told me that I had a huge tumour in my rectum, that it was so big they couldn’t operate on it.
I’m not being flippant but I thought to myself, “How did this happen?” It never struck me that is was life-threatening. I just thought, now that I have it I’d better get something done about it, and at my age you might have said you can pack it in, but I didn’t feel like that at all. I had no option really.
I had to go to St Luke’s Hospital in Dublin and have chemotherapy and radiotherapy to shrink the tumour.
I stayed in the hospital for five weeks. Because of living where I am in the country, trying to get from my place to there every morning would have been a drag, so fair play to them, they looked after me very well.
When I came back I had more tests – MRIs and CT scans – and the surgeon couldn’t believe it, the tumour had reduced by a huge amount. They did the operation to remove the tumour on April 16th and when I woke up I had an ileostomy bag.
The theory of that was they would do a reverse operation in about six weeks, so all going well they would hopefully get rid of the bag and get you back to where you were.
But it didn’t turn out that way. When I was in the hospital I got a bad infection and that delayed the reverse operation for 14 months.
I had another six months of chemotherapy, too, and then last June I had the reverse operation, and that’s where I am now.
I will be getting checks for the rest of my life every so often, so that it’s not going to get a massive grip on me again like it did before. That’s the theory anyway.
The Irish Cancer Society had sent me all the literature about the particular cancer I had and there were nurses available to talk to me, but best of all they were able to put me in touch with a lady in a bowel cancer support group who had the same operation and went though the same thing.
Only for my wife, Winnie, I’d have never got through it. I wouldn’t have been able to handle it. She was able to look after me.
My advice to anyone is to go to the GP. I had two or three signs that told me there was something wrong, something odd and I should have gone. So I would definitely tell people: at the risk of it being a false alarm, don’t say to yourself, “I won’t bother the doctor with it” – go and bother them.
In conversation with Claire O'Connell
April is bowel cancer awareness month. For more information and to get in touch with the Bowel Cancer Support Group, call the National Cancer Helpline on 1800-200700, cancer.ie
