My Colon

Until I was diagnosed with cancer last year, I cringed at mentions of butts, rectums, and feces. But why should people like me live in the shadows, their disease underfunded and misunderstood?

- Laurie Abraham

MY COLON, LIKE YOURS, IS A MUSCULAR five-foot-long tube arranged in the abdomen in the shape of a box. Also called the large intestine, it looks like a fleshy, segmented snake surrounding a bunch of twisty worms; the worms are the tubes of the small intestine. The small intestine absorbs nutrients from food, while its large sibling removes water from what's left via waves of involuntary contractions, which push the increasingly solid mass toward the rectum.

More fascinating, and possibly less gross, the colon is the seat of the much-ballyhooed microbiome, teeming with some 39 trillion bacteria believed to play a major role in the immune system. And the whole gastrointestinal tract, starting with the mouth and ending with the anus, has more neurons than anywhere in the body outside the brain and can function independently of it. A Swiss scientist named Albrecht von Haller made this remarkable “gut as second brain” discovery in 1755 when he removed the colon from an unspecified animal and—behold!—observed it squeezing and releasing on the table before him.

I don’t remember much about the phone call with the interventional gastroenterologist who told me he'd found cancer in my colon. I'd just had a routine colonoscopy—scheduled right on time, ten years after my first at 50. One exchange I do remember.

“Is it treatable?” I asked, trembling, my mind seizing.

“The question isn’t whether it’s treatable,” he replied. “It's whether it's curable.”

Somehow we ended the call.