A very old doctor? (Photo credit: revger)

Washing myself in the shower, it suddenly registers that I haven’t farted this morning. Straight away I know I am in trouble. A tummy ache is a commonplace, tummy aches come and go, but this one is different. My bowel has fallen silent. No wind music. Big news, bad news.

I dry myself, lie down and palpate my abdomen.

Is it distended?

Hard to tell.

Is it tender?

Decidedly.

Listening with the stethoscope, I hear nothing.

I listen harder, longer.

Silence. A clamorous silence, speaking in clinical tongues of bowel obstruction, of an absence of vomiting, of a pain that has been colicky in nature, and is worsening.

I am 64.

A person of that age with a large bowel obstruction most probably has bowel cancer.

That can’t be me. I don’t do cancer. I eat, I run, I work, I fart, I tell fart jokes.

I am large with life, I don’t have cancer.

And yet I hear myself observe that this patient is an Ashkenazic Jew. He has no comforting past history, of diverticular disease, of ulcerative colitis, of Crohn’s Disease.  And his aged mother had a pre-cancerous bowel polyp.

This old bloke, this rationalising self-deceiver has bowel cancer.

I feel a surprising, deep calm. I have cancer, I have ignored two decades of advice to undergo colonoscopy, and now I have bowel cancer.

I will die. Continue reading →