i had this radiation and it was, like, amazing. i had a really a profound improvement in my cancer. the classifications system that’s used is called the tnm classification. t stands for tumour, n stands for nodes and m stands for metastases. so you can determine very grossly how bad your cancer is by putting it into that category. and mine was a t four, n one, m one cancer — that’s pretty bad. the m means metastasis, which means spread beyond the local bed. it had not spread to my liver or my lungs, which is a much more serious thing. but it had spread locally and so i knew i was in bad shape. after the radiation, you couldn’t even see my tumour except for a little tiny nub on my rectum on the inside.
i actually had an argument with my radiation oncologist and said, look, can i maybe just wait and see how it goes? [but] because we used high fraction radiotherapy, [it was] all going to fall apart. you can’t just [leave it].
so i went ahead and had the surgery in march 2016, and the operation i had done was called a pelvic exenteration. that’s the biggest operation, pretty much, that general surgeons do. they took out my rectum, my descending colon, my bladder, my prostate. and then i had to make holes for various stuff to still come out, so i had a colostomy put in which is permanent, which i still have, and also an operation reconstruction called an ileal conduit. it’s a very exotic thing where, because they removed the bladder entirely, the ureters that come out of the kidneys have to be put into a situation where they can drain out to the outside. so you still have a bowel that works and then you’ve got two holes coming out — two stoma, they’re called — coming out of the abdominal wall, one makes pee and the other makes poo. i went through a lot of issues related to that from a psychological perspective.