I noticed something felt off and ignored it for longer than I should have mostly because I was scared of what the answer might be and kept telling myself it was probably nothing. Colon cancer awareness month hit differently the year my uncle was diagnosed because suddenly all those statistics I used to scroll past
When my father’s pathology results arrived after his colon cancer surgery, staging suddenly became the most important word in our family’s vocabulary, yet none of us fully understood its meaning. We only knew lower numbers were better without grasping the clinical reality behind them. His surgeon patiently explained how staging influenced treatment decisions and future
My dad received his colon cancer diagnosis on a Wednesday and met with a surgeon by Friday, leaving us overwhelmed and unsure what to ask. The surgeon explained colon cancer surgery clearly, but fear made it hard to absorb anything. Most of the information passed by without really sinking in. In the days that followed,
When the news broke about James Van Der Beek I was sitting at my kitchen table scrolling through my phone and I genuinely stopped mid-scroll because it hit differently than most celebrity health stories do. Hearing about james van der beek colon cancer made it feel even more real and urgent. My dad went through
I watched my closest friend navigate the first year after her Crohn’s diagnosis completely alone because nobody handed her a practical roadmap for daily life beyond the medication schedule her gastroenterologist provided at discharge. She was figuring out food, stress, sleep, and work entirely through painful trial and error that left her exhausted and discouraged
My cousin spent two years on medications that never really worked before her doctor brought up biologics for crohn’s disease and she honestly cried in that appointment because she had started believing nothing would ever truly help her. She was twenty three, missing work regularly, and quietly grieving the normal life she watched everyone around
I had always been curious about body composition but never really trusted the scale as a true measure of progress because the number never told the whole story. A friend mentioned the Hume health body pod during a conversation about tracking fat versus muscle and I had no idea a device like that even existed
That Tuesday morning reading my gut health test results genuinely stopped me. The gut microbiome transit time measurement sitting at the bottom of the report was flagged in red and the number was nearly three times what the optimal range showed as the target. I had been experiencing bloating, sluggish energy, brain fog that arrived
That Monday morning lying on the bathroom floor at four in the morning genuinely wondering whether what I was experiencing was ever going to end pushed me to finally look for honest answers about how long can a stomach virus last rather than the vague reassurances I had been finding online telling me it would
That Sunday afternoon sitting in the hospital waiting room while my father was being treated for sepsis in the intensive care unit I found myself asking the question that every family member in that situation eventually asks. Is sepsis contagious and were the rest of us at risk from being near him during the acute