Colon Cancer Awareness Month

For Colon Cancer Month, we are sharing a story that can be found in Invisible, Not Imagined from a colon cancer survivor. 

You Don’t Look Sick AnymoreBy Colleen Robbins

My story starts a long time ago, but it is only recently that my illness has become something that I’m going to have to live with for the rest of my life. You wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at me what I’ve gone through, at least not right now. I was diagnosed with colon cancer in August of 2010 for the first time. This is my third time having it and as of right now, it’s not going away. 

This part of my story begins in August of 2016 when I went in for CT scan to check if the cancer had returned—it had, in two of the lymph nodes and a small spot in the lining of my stomach. The spots are VERY small, which is good, but the fact that it was back wasn’t. And the prognosis wasn’t any better. I began chemo again because surgery impossible and because surgery was impossible there was no getting rid of it. So, for four months I went through the harsh chemo but got very sick from it. I ended up having to have a blood transfusion because my hemoglobin was extremely low. After that they switched me to a lighter version of chemo that I’ll have to be on for the foreseeable future if I want to survive, but the cancer is stable and not growing.

It’s not so much the cancer itself that is making me feel crappy, it’s the side effects from the chemo that I’m doing every two weeks and the cumulative effects of all the treatments I received in the past from the previous two times I had cancer. I’m always fatigued, but some days it’s worse than others. I have rashes on my joints and itch all over. Nothing helps for the itch. My skin on my hands and feet dry out and crack badly, which could be misinterpreted has from the cold from winter. I have brain fog, which is kind of hard to explain. It’s not the same thing as amnesia. It’s more poor memory recall and reduced mental acuity. It effects my appetite, I’m not as hungry as I should be, especially at lunch time. I get tired of food fast, sometimes because I’m nauseous and sometimes because things don’t taste right to me anymore. I have problems with certain textures too. I’m at a higher risk for blood clots—both cancer and chemo. I’ve had two already, one in my lungs and one in vein by my heart. It also causes sleep maintenance insomnia. I feel like I’m always just recovering from the flu.

If you’re not bald with a chemo cap on or in a wheel chair it feels like people think you’re just lazy. And it feels like people don’t like to think about people being sick. Someone said to me after my hair started to grow back, “There your hair came back, now you don’t look sick anymore.” That really bothered me, because I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to feel and hurt it my feelings. To me, it seems like people don’t like to deal with people that are sick, so if they can’t physically see it, it’s easier for them to forget about it, so they don’t have to feel sorry for you or worry about you or help you.