What ifs

It's an easy game to play when you're diagnosed with cancer. What if I had eaten better, exercised more, drank herbal tea daily or some other tactic. Easy and natural, but not very productive.

A little over two years ago I met with my GP about some bleeding that we decided must be a internal hemorrhoid. The bleeding wasn't very serious, and I didn't have any follow up work (fecal occult blood test, or colonoscopy) done. The bleeding persisted on and off for the following two years, but never very seriously.

With 20/20 hindsight, it's easy to see that a colonoscopy would have been the wise thing to do. Odds are it would have found a precancerous polyp, and I wouldn't be in the pickle I'm in today. Yet that assumes so much. What if the tumor is relatively new, and/or didn't develop from a polyp? What if I had a colonoscopy in 2003, and been given a clean bill of health? Oncology is such an inexact science from what I've read, and it's often easy to mix correlation with causation.

I worked in the fast food industry for over 16 years, and to say my eating habits are poor would be an understatement. Yet I don't know if my diet contributed to the onset of my cancer. Studies linking diet to colo-rectal cancer are generally inconclusive. Yet it's easy for me to point a finger at my diet, or my change in exercise, or a myriad number of potential cancer triggers. That's why I'm refraining from making grandiose vows to change my lifestyle in the coming years.

I think that my lifestyle will change, whether I make conscious efforts to do so. And these changes are going to occur whether I like them or not. I may not necessarily embrace them, but I will have to live with them. The only change I plan to make (and I think I've already made it) is to do a better job of fostering my friendships and bonds with those I love. I doubt that I'll turn into a Nebraskan version of Mother Teresa, but I can't really go back to being who I was before 7/7...

love

Cj