Life Lessons From Young Colon Cancer Patients

I thought that grandparents or people way older than me could get it. I had no idea that somebody at the age of 27 could get it. I was diagnosed with colon cancer when I was 30 years old. I was 42 when I was diagnosed with cancer. I'm currently in chemotherapy indefinitely. Cancer does take a toll on you, it really does. Financially, physically, mentally, emotionally, anything you can think of. Yeah, cancer is expensive. There's a substantial expense that you incur, whether it's treatment, whether it's lifestyle, whether it's lost income. People need to take young people a lot more serious when they enter these doctor's rooms. The patients are getting younger every year. We as a society or a nation or country, we do overlook young cancer. In the year running into my cancer diagnosis, I had a very full, a very busy life. I'm a retired Olympian. I am the CEO of a digital health company. I was climbing the ladder at work. I was very proud of the goals that I had made for my career. I was very active. I used to work out maybe six times a week, like twice a day. My dreams were I wanted to finish culinary school and eventually get married and have a family. In high school, I was a wrestler. I was on my way to becoming a black belt. I was working out twice a day, getting into shape, lifting again, running. I come from a small town where football is king here, so anything and everything about football is the best. We had purchased our first house. Six months later, we had our dream wedding. A year after that, we had our son. And my husband and I were really just trying to figure it out. It's really hard to talk about symptoms and warning signs before the diagnosis because the reality is it's only apparent with hindsight. I was about seven or eight months pregnant when I started to have severe abdominal pains. I had rectal bleeding. I was nauseous all the time, vomiting. I started having bowel issues where I couldn't use the bathroom, constipation, blood in my stool, and I was losing an excessive amount of weight. I took a little vacation out to California, and I came back with a really bad stomachache. And really bad abdominal pain. I didn't have any direct warning signs for the cancer itself. Because I did have ulcerative colitis at the time, I couldn't really differentiate what was ulcerative colitis and what was actually colon cancer. I regularly give blood, and the last three times I tried to give blood in 2024, they turned me around because my iron levels were too low. When I was talking to my doctor about it, they said that it was just everything that goes along with pregnancy symptoms. A year later, I had my son, and the pains had not subsided. The bleeding had not subsided. I remember specifically laying in bed multiple times and Googling the symptoms that I was having, and at the bottom of the list was always cancer. And I remember so many times in my head saying, that can't be it. I'm sitting in the doctor's office, and he says, you're way too young to be sitting in my office. He told me, okay, we're going to do a procedure that's really rare for your age, and we're going to do a colonoscopy. I went into the emergency room pretty convinced that I had appendicitis, and ultimately my oncologist said, you have cancer. And I was like, all right. The hardest thing about all of this has been picking up the phone to tell people who love you what's happening. I remember talking to my sister and really planning for what I was going to say to my mom and dad in England about their kid having cancer. Having to be vulnerable and having to give information that you know is going to be hard for people to hear, 100% the hardest thing about this for me. I'm 12 cycles into my chemotherapy. My oncologist says, good, blood work looking better, scans looking better. We're driving in the right direction. And some people sit down, and that's not the case, and it's not their fault. It is that time, chemo around 174 today. I'm exhausted. I'm considered terminal and incurable. I go get scans, and I get the blood work every three months, and there's still active cancer in my body. I have been in chemotherapy and targeted therapy for over eight years now. It is maintenance to keep me stable because the cancer has come back, and it has spread further three times. I'm already predisposed to cancer. So I was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2019. When I heard I had cancer again, I was like, oh, great, not again. Now what? Being so young and having your whole life ahead of you, and you have all these dreams and aspirations of, you know, what you're going to do with your life, and it's just like my life came to a screeching halt. It's probably too soon to figure out how this diagnosis has affected my career. I've had hard conversations with our executive team and with our board that if there's a point at which I'm not doing what needs to be done, then we have a conversation. Fortunately, that hasn't come up. I work at a large bank. When I got the diagnosis, I couldn't do the same things that I was doing. My job was very, very demanding. I actually decided to resign after 10 years. That was something that I never thought I would do, but I needed to do that for my health and for myself. I worked for my family. My uncle owned convenience stores, hardware stores, and a few car washes, and I worked my way up. I knew I had to go on short-term disability because you can't be on chemo and then get down into gas tanks below ground in the middle of wintertime. I am currently working as a chef. One of the side effects that I really hated was the loss of taste and smell. I wouldn't be able to smell the food that I was cooking, and I wouldn't be able to taste it. A regular 9-to-5 gig is not in the cards for me anymore, so I really have to find a new passion, a new dream to pursue. I miss producing for society. I miss having my own income. I miss the freedom that work allowed me. The financial cost of dealing with cancer is a lot. We had no idea how much that was going to cost us. Every time I went to the hospital, I owed more money. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars just for being in there. $2,000 here, $1,000 there, $600 for this test or for that test. Chemo treatments, the first infusion can range anywhere from $5,000 to $8,000. I got a bill actually a few months ago for $8,000. It was for a single injection that stimulates your bone marrow to produce white blood cells. I'm not sure that I could have declined it, but getting that bill out of nowhere is sort of frightening. The biggest bill I ever received was over $300,000, and that's just how much one month of treatment plus the surgery that I had had cost. Our insurance company covered a lot, but in the back of my head, I'm like, man, how can people afford this? There are all the things that, you know, you have to pay for to keep your sanity, so when you look in the mirror, you don't see someone who has cancer. I had to buy an all-new wardrobe because I had lost 20 pounds. I had to get all-new clothes. The wigs were probably about $200 a piece, and I think I have four of them. My hair has fallen out three times in eight years. At the beginning, it made me so weak at times. I couldn't barely get up off the couch, and I just felt like the weakest person alive. Sport has always been important in my life. I think, you know, growing up in high school, I was on every team the school had. As an undergraduate, I was varsity rugby, varsity rowing, and then continued rowing through to the Olympics. For the four years running into the 2008 Games, I was training 30, 35 hours a week. I went into the hospital at 140 pounds, and I came out at 98. That was an unrecognizable change in my body. That lack of physical strength was so different for me, and you just, in that moment, your identity is sort of gone. That's a different relationship with your body than being an elite athlete who's trying to be the best in the world at something. You were so strong and so capable, and you see yourself lose those things. It's hard. It's hard. I still like to think that I'm an athlete. I've been practicing martial arts for the past, I would say, 25 years. Practice is only about an hour, but within that hour, I have to take anywhere between four to five breaks just to catch my breath. On the good days, I've really enjoyed getting back into the gym a little bit, being sort of outside, and I think that's been just as important to me physically and mentally. I work out about three times a week. I do Pilates. It's not easy, and it's not cheap, but I do it because it makes me feel good. One day you'll be feeling fine, and the next day you'll be feeling so dark, and you just need somebody to talk to. I come from a southern Appalachian culture, and as a guy, you just weren't supposed to admit mental health or depression or struggles. It's very tough for guys to have to now take a back seat to provision and rely on your partner to kind of pick up your slack, and it's tough. It's a real hit. There probably aren't a lot of therapists who can have those conversations, and if there are, I could not find them easily. When I'm not feeling well, I'll journal, and I'll get all those emotions out, and what I started to do was write my son letters for every year of his life. Figuring out how we actually make sure that every person with a cancer diagnosis has access to a therapist is an absolute imperative. Some people turn to religion. I'm not a very religious guy. I am very spiritual. My faith definitely helped me out during my treatment. Before treatment, during treatment, I would always pray to the Hail Mary. Whatever your thing is, whatever brings you peace, whatever brings you happiness, lean into those things so that you can heal. The social cost of having cancer is feeling like your friends are having fun without you. There's quite a few friends that I'm not as close to anymore because I couldn't do the same things that I used to do. Some friends that were there that I've known for the longest, they just vanished like ghosts. They disappeared. Maybe nobody wants to hang out with me, or maybe nobody can see past the cancer. It's something that I've fought against sort of internally, which is recognizing that I do need to recover, I do need to heal, and at the same time, I don't want to be sidelined because I'm sick. At the same time, some of my very best friends, they came and see me when I was bedridden for 23 hours a day for 14 months. You can't really put words to that and how much that does strengthen a friendship. Sometimes I think I'm watching life go by and I'm on the other side of the mirror. I feel so wrapped up in cancer at times. I don't have that identity outside of my relationship with cancer. The most challenging part of my cancer treatment was relearning how to be me, how to be a dad. What is this? To be a husband, to relearn how to do the simple things in life that I otherwise took for granted beforehand. You are more than this one-dimensional cancer patient. It doesn't define you as someone who is incapable of being a wife, a husband, a mother, a sibling, a leader. We are still whole and complete humans and individuals. It's interesting and I don't know whether this makes me positive or nuts, but I've always been very positive about the future. I never had the thought, I'm going to die, but that comes from a place of privilege. When you have a support system, when you have health insurance, when you have good access to care. My goal is to see my son grow up and to grow old with my husband. Those are my two goals. She can see you, but looking at that one, I can't. Hey. Hey, how are you? Good. After a couple months of surgery, they did the final scan and they told me, oh, congratulations, you're NED, which is no evidence of disease, which is pretty much like when you're cancer-free. It felt so amazing, liberating, really. We want to try for another baby soon, and I feel this is just going to be another lesson, another story that I can tell to my kids later when they get older, and they're going to see me as a hero, I guess. I'm very lucky to be alive. I know saying you're very lucky and having incurable cancer is a very weird thing to say. If you're young, you've got time. You've got time to heal. You've got time to adjust. I'm still having a great time. I still smile. I have laughter. I'm enjoying my life, and everyone asks me, how's life going? I'm like, life is beautiful. If nothing else, this has taught me that you have one life, and I want to live it. I want to keep doing work that I think is important. I want to keep spending time with my friends. I want to get up early and go for a run on the beach at sunrise. I just want to get back to normal. Colon cancer doesn't care about your age, about your sex, about your ethnicity. Everybody can get it. I want others to understand that this disease is taking a lot of young lives really quickly. It is one of the most preventable cancers because the colonoscopy and screening can literally take the cancer out of the colon. Right now, the recommended age for a colonoscopy is 45. We need to lower the age of a colonoscopy. Because the patients are getting younger every year. Don't let society or stigmas stop you from getting screened because a colonoscopy is just so much better than chemo. Go and get the screening that can save your life.