CASE HISTORY: Before he was diagnosed with bowel cancer as he approached his 58th birthday, Leslie Dungan had lost the energy which fuelled his interest in activities such as mountain-climbing, table-tennis and motorcycling.
That was in 1999. Today he has his energy back, has returned to all his previous activities and has added on a few, such as frequent trips to the Continent. But before the diagnosis he had come dangerously close to losing everything by failing to go to the doctor about his symptoms.
"I had a problem for nine months at least before I did anything about it," he says. "I had almost left it too late." Before he went to the doctor he says: "I had gradually lost vigour. For instance I found I could no longer climb mountains the way I had been doing. It came to a point where I couldn't go up the stairs without stopping."
Why didn't he go to the doctor sooner? "It's very hard to understand at this stage looking at it. I had developed the notion that I was on the way out."
It was a notion which could very well have come true but a for a good friend of his "who persuaded me to see the doctor and within days I was in hospital. I had to have a lot of blood put into me because my blood count was way down, which was the main reason why my vigour had gone down.
"As soon as they got the blood into me I started to feel full of beans. But I had a cancer in my lower bowel. Usually they would treat it with chemotherapy and radiation before operating but in my case it was so urgent they operated ... Then I had radiation and chemotherapy."
The possibility that he might have bowel cancer had never occurred to him. "There hasn't been a history of it in my family. so the idea of it wasn't one in my mind."
Following the surgery he used a colostomy bag but now he uses irrigation (similar to the colonic irrigation health fad) every two days instead. "If you have the greater part of your colon remaining, irrigation is feasible for you," he says.
The idea of using a colostomy bag, though, had not particularly distressed him given that he had previously got used to the mistaken idea that he was dying. "If I had not had that idea I would probably have found it psychologically more difficult to accept."
The chemotherapy was "not one of the more aggressive forms. I actually didn't have a problem with it. I had mouth ulcers but they were easy enough to deal with".
It is, he says, almost a cliche to say that a serious illness forces people to look at their lives and "it certainly did for me. You kind of take stock of your life and your values. You tend to say I must do those things which are important and forget those things which are not important."
"I would encourage people not to be holding back about being checked out," he adds. "There isn't anything I can think of that I used to do that I can't do at this stage. I have added things on. For instance, I very rarely went to the Continent before this and now I go a lot."
He emphasises that "the outcome is likely to be positive if you deal with it early. In my situation I'm sure it would not have involved surgery had I attended to it."
Padraig O'Morain