So here's my story...
Age 39. Presented to family GP with rectal bleeding. He did no exam, pretty much dismissed it as a hemorrhoid. Age 40. Complained again to GP that bleeding was continuing (sporadically). GP finally decides to refer me to the local thoracic surgeon. This surgeon gives me a go over with an anoscope and schedules a colonoscopy the next day. Turns out I had a 5cm tumor...
I was married with two very small kids. Not the best time to get cancer.
A week later I'm starting radiation therapy to try and shrink the tumor. A week or so after that (things tend to blur when medicine moves fast), I'm started on chemotherapy treatments. I start to lose weight (I was 6'2"/240lb at the start of this). I get a portacath above my heart so chemo drugs can go straight into a big vein. I carry a pump around to push my chemo drugs in on a reliable schedule. This combined treatment goes on for a month before I go through surgery. I'm experiencing neuropathy from the oxaliplatin, which makes your extremities very sensitive to the cold (and of course I live where you have real winters). Foods taste wrong too.
Go in for surgery and come out with an ostomy. The surgeon had tried to save enough stuff so I didn't need a bag, but well, sometimes biology has other ideas. The tumor was too large and too close to all the rectal muscles. At least the surgeon said there were good margins, and no signs of metastasizing. So now I have a bag. At this point I way about 160lbs. Nothing tastes good except candy, and the docs are worried about my weight loss. So I get the green light to eat as much candy as I want.
Now I'm alive, with a bag, but alive. I'm taking some experimental oral post-surgical chemo pill 4x daily to try and kill any little bastard tumor cells that might have been released. These suck. Chemo is always a race to kill cancer cells before the chemo drugs kill you. My oncologist is always checking white cell counts, but now has some DNA test that looks for tumor markers. This is pretty cool. My cell counts improve and the tumor market analysis looks good. So I'm eventually sent home. On my way out of my last meeting with my oncologist and his nurse, I ask him how often he gets to send someone home in my situation. The look in his eyes made it apparent how tough a job these folks have.
So now 18 years later, I've been able to run a full marathon, finish my basement by myself, build the coolest shed in my back yard. Settle into a good IT career at a company where I can retire. And most importantly, be there when my kids graduated from school. Be there for my wife when her dad passed away from cancer. Just be there...
So if a colonoscopy scares you, as they say in The Wire; ain't no thing. Don't be like Farrah Fawcett who died of anal cancer because she avoided treatment. 150K new cases of colorectal cancer are diagnosed annually in the US. And if discovered early, it can be treated far less invasively and less life-altering than if found later.