When it helps to make bottom jokes
It’s difficult to imagine that 19 years ago anyone over the age of 5 would be making jokes about poo. They certainly would not have done so in connection with bowel cancer something rarely discussed outside hospitals even though it killed 19,000 Britons a year.
Lynn Faulds Wood could have been one of them. Then in 1991, aged 41, she learnt that she had advanced bowel cancer. She is cured and has spent the time since campaigning to stop people dying from the condition, not least by raising the profile of the much-maligned bottom. Her tactics are imaginative and groundbreaking — humour among them as the cartoons on this page show — and many people, whether they know it or not, owe their lives to her.
“It’s a grim, cruel disease and I wanted to find a way of making people happy to talk about it,” she says. “If you use jokes and cartoons on leaflets about symptoms, bottoms can make you smile.”
Last week The Lancet published research from Imperial College London showing that a 5-minute Flexi-Scope screening test for bowel cancer cut the death rate by 43 per cent and reduced the number of cases by a third. Bowel cancer still kills 16,000 people a year in Britain and this test could save 3,000 of them: the next government will be under pressure to back routine Flexi-Scope screening at the age of 55 as a matter of urgency.
“This will revolutionise the way that people are treated,” says Faulds Wood. “I want to stop people going through what I went through. My son, Nick, was 3. It was a horrible time and for five years, because I had advanced cancer, I didn’t know whether I would live or die. I would spare anyone going through that and the test has the potential to spare tons of people.”
A couple of weeks ago Faulds Wood, once television’s consumer champion on the BBC Watchdog programme which she co-presented with her husband John Stapleton, was asked by a stranger at a station whether she was “the cancer woman”. She said she was. Her television appearances are now connected to raising awareness of bowel cancer and she runs a charity, Lynn’s Bowel Cancer Campaign, staffed by volunteers. It provides information on how to spot symptoms — hence her Spotty Dog cartoon character. “People love dogs but they don’t love their bottoms. We thought we’d get to them through dogs.”
Today a programme such as Embarrassing Bodies on Channel 4 is commonplace, yet two decades ago bodily functions were regarded as off-limits for public discussion. Lynn’s achievement is rooted in the instinct that removing the barriers surrounding the subject of bottoms and poo could save lives.
“Looking back, it was like the Dark Ages,” she says. “I’d never heard of bowel cancer. I’m not sure that embarrassment is the big problem, but I meet people who don’t talk about these things because they are shy. When I went on television to launch a phoneline in which I talk about the symptoms of bowel cancer, 156,000 people attempted to ring. People like to do these things in their own home because it’s private.
“Yet over the years I’ve spoken to 10,000 Rotarians and by the end of each session you’ve got 200 of them putting their hand up to tell you what they call poo. I grew up in the West of Scotland where for onomatopoeic reasons we called poo ‘plonk’. Then I moved to London and someone said ‘Would you like a glass of plonk?’ I tell the Rotarians that story and they fall about laughing.”
Faulds Wood talks to Rotarians because they are the right age: 90 per cent of people who develop bowel cancer are over 55. She recently addressed the union, Unison, which has 1.3 million members, 72,000 of whom will get bowel cancer, she pointed out. Thirty-five thousand will die from it — yet this is a condition that can be treated if caught early.
In 2000 she persuaded the Prince of Wales to say that everyone should talk about bottoms and bowels to reduce the incidence of bowel cancer, and in 2003 she was invited to the meet the Pope to launch the world’s first global bowel cancer awareness campaign.
A tall, slender woman, she is dynamic and endlessly curious, and admits that her initial impetus was to find out what had gone wrong for her. She asked doctors and built up a network of specialist contacts and today a lot of her time is spent working with medical professionals and lobbying legislators across Europe to encourage and fund best practice. She realised that informing the public would be effective only if doctors and nurses were also knowledgeable about the condition. It is important for them to be trained in screening for it — and to be supported by political intent to catch early bowel cancers.
“I had to start with the doctors. There’s no point educating the public into the hands of people who aren’t as good as they could be. Now Britain leads with this new test but 19 years ago a lot of doctors didn’t know much about bowel cancer, they weren’t trained to examine the colon, and the quality of these procedures was poor. Now there are training centres and if you want to take part in a screening programme you have to be accredited. There are many excellent nurse endoscopists.”
To underline the point she wants to get a mobile endoscopy unit into the British Parliament. “If we can persuade MPs to be screened, we will find some with early cancers which will be removed painlessly and we will save some lives. This is a hugely expensive and traumatic disease and we have to make people realise that screening is the cheapest solution. I don’t focus on trying to save you once you’re in trouble because other charities do that. Some take money from pharmaceutical companies, we don’t.”
She has also helped to set up and fund a database in Portsmouth involving 35,000 people who have bowel problems, although most of them do not have cancer. This has led to the first set of evidence-based symptoms advice for bowel cancer. There’s not much she won’t do: a video of her own colonoscopy is available to reassure people that the procedure need not be painful, and with 12 other people she is about to do something much more frightening: a skydive.
We are talking in the vast, comfortable kitchen of her home near Richmond, southwest London. Her own cancer was diagnosed after she noticed intermittent rectal bleeding. The first GP she mentioned it to told her not to worry. “He thought bowel cancer was an old man’s disease. It was such a subtle symptom, I wasn’t unwell, I hadn’t lost weight, I had no idea I had anything serious.”
It was almost a year before the condition was diagnosed and only after surgery did she discover that she had a one in three chance of survival.
“I came home after the diagnosis — and it still affects me — and there was John watching television with Nick. I’m about to tell John I’ve got cancer and my son is 3 and I’m determined he will have a normal childhood. That’s why I do this. Most of us [with bowel cancer] don’t have to die and I’m so glad that I lived to see my son grow up.”
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article7114948.ece
