What to Expect: Colorectal Cancer

The first recommendation I make to people is, decide that you want to live. It took almost two years for me to get a diagnosis of late stage colorectal cancer. I didn't think I was going to die. I didn't know what was going to happen. My immediate reaction was wanting to get right into life, and my life was about swimming every morning.

I know it gave me a lot of comfort to get back in the water. I recommend that somebody learn as quickly as they can how to address this disease, learn what this disease is. This is not something that I did. I dropped out of life as I took the six months of chemo.

I hid in a basement. I didn't respond to phone calls. Isolation almost did me in. There was one person who was sort of a weak link in my network. She had colon cancer, and she was finished with her treatment. And she called me just to tell me that she hoped that I knew that she

was thinking of me. And I told her then that I was thinking of stopping, and she said, oh, I hope you don't do that because it's insurance for you, and I hope that you'll stay with it. And something about that phone call and the fact that somebody else had gotten through it kept me doing the treatment.

So I completed the six months of chemo even though it wasn't particularly fun. It was very punishing actually. When I was diagnosed 13 years ago, nobody wanted to have anything to do with talking about colorectal cancers or disease. Makes it very, very difficult to the patient. I felt that an important survival piece for me was

to continue to learn as much as I could, so that should it recur, which it can do and does so frequently within the first five years, I would live.