‘The longer we delay’, said Ban Ki-Moon, one of a long line of UN Chiefs with delightful names, ‘the more we will pay’.
When you become sixty, and if you are lucky, you get a number of presents from your family and friends, and one from the local NHS bowel cancer screening centre. Awkward, I know, but please give this 2 minutes more.
Mine arrived the same day as a batch of Christmas cards and also the parish magazine, in a little box that anonymized its contents only very slightly. Being Christmas, it became public property before I hid it away whilst deciding what to do with it.
After a week of it being in the kitchen, I sat it on my desk, and thought: ‘I’ll do it at the weekend; it’s been a busy few days.’
Then it turned out to be a weekend away on Dartmoor and, well, the car was very loaded.
The next week passed and I thought: ‘I’m doing a dry January. I’ll leave it as late as I can as it will all be, well, as ‘good’ as it can. They’ll like that.’
Half way through the following week it was annoying me, and I put it in the top drawer of my desk, thinking to myself: ‘they’ll be busy at this time of year. I’ll let them get through the Christmas rush, and then do it.’
A week later, they sent me a reminder, gently expressing the hope in 13 different languages that I would utilize the kit, and that only 2% of people ever heard back from them again once they had sent it in. ‘I’m going away for a couple of days,’ I told myself. ‘I’ll sort it quickly when I get back.’
And on it went, moving from drawer to drawer like a, well, like a cancer test kit moving from drawer to drawer. It would catch me unawares, staring out at me like a guilty secret, or like an aunt you have forgotten to thank for a birthday present. I even had a thought one morning that I could send back something from one of my Jack Russells, on the basis that they would have their sample, and I would stop feeling guilty.
Then one day, I saw a Linkedin post by someone who had done the same as me, but had eventually thrown it away. It turned out that he would have been one of the 2% called back, and that he would have been one of the 11% of that 2% who actually had bowel cancer, and that he would, in all probability, have had a nasty little operation, a bit of therapy, and then plodded on through life watching his children have children, and getting to know them. But because he hadn’t bothered to do it, he, well, you are educated, and you know the rest. And then I thought of my parents.
Both might conceivably still be around, as it was bowel cancer that got them, my dad at 67, and my mum at 72. Bowel cancer in an era of no screening, and in an age of bacon and eggs for breakfast three times a week. And suddenly, when I re-read that post, I replayed all those ghastly hospital trips and visits, the earnest look on the surgeons’ faces, and that gradual reining in of horizons and I thought: ‘have you taken leave of your senses?’ And the answer is ‘yes’: if both your parents had it, you have a 12% chance of getting it yourself. Yes, you have taken leave of your senses.
So I retreated to a place of sanctuary, and did it. And then I walked down to the postbox with my insolently public ‘we know what you’ve been doing’ carton, and popped it in. They probably have a bit of a giggle at the sorting office when a box comes through. I know I would.
Then, for five days, each twinge between my rib cage and my thighs spoke of imminent disaster; each little spasm of lower back pain in the gym had me rehearsing the things I’d say when the inevitable reply turned up.
And then it came back, and it was fine.
And all I could think about was this. Much, most probably, of what happens to us medically is beyond our control, and we are fortunate until we are not. Maybe it is our fate to live to live to fourscore years and ten and pass gently away, in Alan Bennett’s immortal words, ‘under the coverlets of a clean cottage hospital bed, and under the weight of an improving book’. Or maybe we will get taken obscenely early, ambushed by a thing of whose presence we can have had no possible warning. But for an illness to take us that we were given the chance of spotting….
When I looked up the statistics, it seems that only about 40% of us ever send that box back. And, knowing that this blog has developed a modest readership, I figured that the one really useful thing I could do is urge you all to a) take it seriously when yours turns up and b) share this around a bit in case in influences just one waverer, who just might, in turn, be a two-percenter.
After all, it is a disease that kills 16,300 of us every year.
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