The Other C Word

Quite a few people have been interested in the events that lead up to me hearing "the other C word" and "you have" in the same sentence. So here is a quick run down.

In September 2010 I got a little sick, had some gastrointestinal cramping, weight loss, small amounts of blood during bowel movements and runny poo (remember I live in China though, I don't remember what a normal poo is). Tim and I were performing in schools in southern China and so at the time I just put it down to dodgy dumplings.

From October to December I was busy building a science communication empire with my best mate Tim. We are quite famous in Beijing and our egos have grown accordingly.

On January 3 I flew from Beijing to Melbourne to sort out my Chinese visa and have a colonoscopy as the cramping and bleeding had continued off and on since September. The colonoscopy revealed a lesion in my sigmoid colon and pathology revealed that it's a malignant adenocarcinoma (malignant means cancer; adenocarcinoma is the medical term given to a tumour that begins growing in a cell layer that produces mucous - the colon has lots of these cell types).

A CAT scan (the time-portal looking machine to the right) revealed no other tumours around my colon or in my liver or lungs. The doctors were particularly interested in the lungs and liver because these are common places that colon cancers  spread to.

Although there is a chance I have cancer cells hiding out in places around my body, knowing that we only have the one tumour to battle at this stage is a huge relief.