Words by Smiley Team
As one of the 2,500 or so under-50-year-olds who get diagnosed with bowel cancer each year, Chris Stubbs was lucky enough to recognise he had the disease at an early stage and survive. Since then he has toured the country and spoken online to raise awareness for the charity dedicated to supporting people with this type of cancer, Bowel Cancer UK.
Like many, Chris was at first reluctant to go to his GP when he started getting bowel cancer symptoms. But after speaking to a friend, he took a life-saving trip that led him to have radiotherapy and chemotherapy followed by surgery. Fortunately, he only had a grade one cancer and the treatment successfully removed it from his body.
“I got involved in volunteering for Bowel Cancer UK because I wanted to give something back after the journey I went through,” explained Chris.
On 16th April, Chris will join a Facebook live stream with the charity to help share information about bowel cancer symptoms and treatments for Bowel Cancer Awareness Month. The event will build on the list of awareness-raising talks Chris gives every month or so, at which he shares his experience and advice to library groups and other organisations.
“We tell people that if they do get the diagnosis then it’s not the end of the world. It’s a message of hope that if it’s caught early on it’s a good prognosis,” he said.
Chris’s talks offer an opportunity for people to understand bowel cancer symptoms, how cancer develops, how many people get it, the risk factors and more. It also helps build a societal knowledge of the disease and encourages over-60-year-olds to make use of the test for bowel cancer which they are offered every two years.
Bowel cancer is a common form of cancer in both men and women, especially over the age of 50, and roughly one in 20 people will get it during their lifetime.
Bowel Cancer UK offers advice and emotional support to people with the disease. Their nurses are on hand to respond to queries about bowel cancer and advise people on how to get treatment.
When Chris was diagnosed he hadn’t heard of the charity but believes they would have made his journey much easier if he’d reached out to them.
“I thought it was my problem to deal with by myself,” he recalled. “I remember sitting in a waiting room, reading an old pamphlet about an operation I was about to have done and I thought I was going to have a slit up my front. But what I didn’t realise was that they puncture little holes in you and was laproscopic. If I’d known about the charity, their nurses could have told me about this and made the experience less scary.”
For information and guidance from Bowel Cancer UK nurses email [email protected].
To support their work, help spread awareness and prevent deaths due to bowel cancer, donate here.
