In the Spring of 2017, during the year after I turned 50, I got a note in the mail reminding me to get screened for colon cancer. That was the beginning of a journey I never expected to take.

During my time off work, preparing, having surgery, recovering, I wrote each day: sometimes a journal, sometimes a poem, a song, or the rock opera unicorn project I was working on. When I looked back at the end of the summer, a reoccurring theme emerged in some of those words: how the medicinal science that I had experienced for the first time in my life was so amazing that it almost seemed like magic. I half-remembered a quote from Arthur C Clarke on that theme, but then found an earlier statement by Charles Fort who talked of something,  “… that may some day be considered understandable, but that, in these primitive times, so transcends what is said to be the known that it is what I mean by magic.”

For no particular reason I wrote my story with colon cancer as a cartoon strip.

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Episode 1: Stupid Cancer

The title comes straight from the first page of my notebook that I bought on the same day I got my cancer diagnosis.

Episode 2: Computed Tomography

When I failed the initial screening test I had a colonoscopy, which I learned is commonly called ‘a scope’. It’s the long instrument with a camera on the end that goes inside you to look for bad things. My scope didn’t reach far enough so the surgeon sent me for a CT scan to make sure she had looked thoroughly.

A tomograph is a picture of a slice through something. It comes from the Greek word Tomos which means to cut. (I mention this same Greek root in another story “How to Build Your Own Nuclear Reactor: and What Your Friends Will Think” because our word ‘atom’ comes from the same root and means ‘uncuttable’). Anyway a CT machine takes many pictures that are a slice through a person, then puts them all together to make a 3D image. Like a bacon slicer but in reverse. Each image-slice is an x-ray, so to make the whole tomograph picture a patient receives many x-rays, and quite a large dose of radiation.

I wasn’t expecting the CT scan and was still drowsy from my colonoscopy when I woke up in the CT room. I am grateful my surgeon asked for one though. Her thoroughness diagnosed my cancer. My empty bowel was inflated with gas (I will let you imagine how) to help make a good image. That was no fun.

Episode 3: The Second Scope

Seeing a cancer on the CT scan the doctor wanted a second try to reach the tumour, which was in my cecum, the very end of the colon, where it joins to the small intestine. She wanted to remove a piece for tests. So I needed a second scope.

Taking a piece of the disease to use for a purpose unknown to me gave me the thought for another episode about rattling magic charms. In the end the second attempt was not successful, so the doctors would only be able to do tests on my cancer after it had been removed in surgery. I was scheduled for two weeks time, but a vacancy came up and my date was brought forward by a week. I just wanted it out of me as soon as that could be done, though I dreaded the thought of being cut open.

Episode 4 to 9: To be added soon