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First, however, you need to give yourself permission to home in on how you feel and get the message. Aches and pains, bleeding you can't explain, the sense that nothing tastes good anymore, tossing and turning all night - whatever doesn't seem quite right to you probably isn't. Your body is smart enough to send you warning signals. All you have to do is pay attention. And if a symptom turns out not to be serious, so much the better. There's nothing embarrassing about telling your doctor you've been seeing blood on the toilet paper, and finding out the cause is hemorrhoids instead of colon cancer. Your doctor will be as pleased as you are with that diagnosis. And it goes without saying that if you do have cancer, you'll be glad you caught the illness early enough that a cure may be possible. In other words, rectal bleeding is not normal. Your body is telling you that something is wrong. Don't dismiss the symptom just because it might be nothing serious.

I am thinking of the very sad case of Steve White. He had what he called "bowel problems" starting in his early thirties. On his honeymoon, he confessed as much to his bride, Cindy. Back home, he went to a doctor and said he was often constipated and occasionally saw some blood. The doctor put him on a high-fiber diet. Cindy did what she could to keep him on it. But by his own admission, Steve cheated a lot. He was a rising stockbroker and he liked his power breakfasts and power lunches, heavy on the eggs and bacon and meat and potatoes. The bowel problems continued, but Steve never went back to the doctor. Why bother, when he knew the trouble was that he wasn't eating the way he should? But on some level, Steve also knew it was more than that. How could a change in his bowel pattern happen when he hadn't changed any of his lifestyle habits? It just didn't seem right.

It wasn't. Fast-forward to a damp April morning five years later. Cindy got a call at the school where she taught third grade and their twins, Amy and Marla, were in kindergarten. Steve had been taken to the emergency room with a dangerously high fever. The doctors on duty were mystified and by the time Cindy got there, Steve had already been admitted. In the days that followed, tests revealed that Steve had colon cancer. The symptom that got him to the hospital has been dubbed "tumor fever." But long before that, Steve had harbored the fear that he wasn't well. Yet he failed to act on that fear. Doctors estimated that Steve's cancer, a slow-growing form, had taken over five years to get to the advanced stage they diagnosed that April. If he had believed his visceral feelings and pressed until he got a diagnostic test called a colonoscopy, polyps could have been detected and excised easily before they became malignant. As it was, Steve's chances didn't look good. And in fact, he died a little over a year later at the age of thirty-eight. True, the doctor Steve originally saw could have ordered a sigmoidoscopy or a colonoscopy, but Steve hadn't sounded all that urgent about his symptoms. Also, there was no family history of colon cancer, and Steve never went back to give his doctor a second chance. The only person who really knew, day in and day out, that something was very much amiss was Steve himself. His body was talking and he wasn't listening.

Here's another story, but one with a positive outcome. Tim O'Connor, age thirty-two, did listen when his body talked. Tim is an avid golfer. One Saturday as he lofted the little white ball a respectable distance into the air, he felt a tearing pain in his groin. His foursome had been walking, but the one behind them had an electric cart. They drove Tim back to the clubhouse. By that time, he was also feeling nauseated. He called his "telenurse," a person assigned by his HMO to field phone calls from patients. She was soothing, but didn't seem to grasp the intensity of the pain or the severity of the problem. She suggested an ice pack. "A guy would have understood," Tim said later, sounding exactly like women who complain that male doctors don't get it about menstrual cramps or labor. In any case, Tim believed his body, not the nurse. He asked his buddies to get him to the ER.

Diagnosis: torsion, or twisting of the right testicle around its own spermatic cord. Because Tim got immediate attention instead of sitting in the clubhouse with an ice pack, his testicle was saved via surgery. Had he waited more than twenty-four hours, with the blood supply to the testicle effectively cut off, he would have lost the testicle. "Sometimes you just have to go with what you know," Tim says.

Tags: Health

About the Author

MARIE SAVARD, M.D., is an internationally known internist, women's health expert, and patients' rights champion. She is the creator of The Savard Health Record. Dr. Savard is also a medical writer and seminar provider who has lectured throughout the world on the principle of taking charge. She serves as medical director of the Cabrini Nursing Home. Her past highlights include: Director of the Center for Women's Health and associate professor at the Medical College of Pennsylvania/Hahnemann University; World Health Organization's technical advisor to the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing); Women's Day magazine “Your Health” columnist; Philadelphia Magazine “Top Doctor” since the 1980s and a host of the popular radio show Medical Frontiers.

About the Author

Sondra Forsyth is a 1999 recipient of a National Magazine Award for an article on colon cancer, as well as the winner of an award from the American Digestive Health Foundation. Ms. Forsyth has served as executive editor of Ladies' Home Journal, and is the author or co-author of seven books. She has written extensively about health and medicine as well as other topics for the major magazines.