“I thought maybe I needed to stop coffee. Or maybe not put cream in the coffee. But when I cut that out and it didn’t improve, I thought, ‘All right, I better get this checked out,’” he said.
After undergoing a colonoscopy, he felt optimistic and was not expecting serious news. With no family history of the disease, being in what he described as “great shape,” and maintaining a healthy diet, a cancer diagnosis seemed unlikely.
“I felt really good coming out of anesthesia, that I’d finally done it,” he recalled. “Then the gastroenterologist said – in his most pleasant bedside manner – that it was cancer. I think I went into shock.”
He added: “I’d always associated cancer with age and with unhealthy, sedentary lifestyles. But I was in amazing cardiovascular shape. I tried to eat healthy – or as far as I knew it at the time.”
Rising Cases in Younger People
In the UK, around 44,100 people are diagnosed with colon or rectal cancer each year, while in the United States the figure is approximately 150,000 annually.