WITH June being Bowel Cancer Awareness Month and tomorrow marking Red Apple Day - Bowel Cancer Australia’s annual giving day - local bowel cancer survivor, Wayne Crawford, is using his experience to encourage others to remain cautious of bowel cancer and start conversations about the disease.

Mr Crawford’s world changed in 1996 when he discovered he had a rare inherited condition called Familial Adenomatous Polyposis (FAP) which causes precancerous polyps to grow in your colon and rectum, that are nearly 100 percent certain to develop into cancer later in life.

Mr Crawford was tested for the rare gene as a teenager after his father was diagnosed with FAP when he was ill with bowel cancer. 

“It sort of grows hundreds and hundreds of polyps in your bowels that are precancerous and then one day they just go ‘oh hello, here I am, bang I’m cancerous’,” Mr Crawford said.

While he had no symptoms of bowel cancer at the time, Mr Crawford underwent his first bowel operation in 1997 (when he was a teenager) after doctors discovered his bowel was full of precancerous polyps.

After experiencing stomach and back pain near the end of 2017, doctors told Mr Crawford the news nobody ever wants to hear, diagnosing him with stage three bowel cancer in January 2018.

“It shook our world,” he said.

“It just tipped us upside down and I was in for surgery (in Geelong), then of course you come out of surgery and then they say, ‘right now you’ve got to go do chemotherapy’.

“They still can’t tell us today how I got the cancer.

“They believe it was where they joined the large bowel to the small bowel, they believe there was a polyp growing in there somewhere and they missed it.”

From there, Wayne underwent 12 rounds of chemotherapy in six months in Warrnambool, which he said left him with neuropathy - damage to his nerve endings resulting in no feeling in his fingertips.

“The first day I went down, the oncologist saw me and said, ‘were gonna kill you from the inside out’, and I still remember that today because that’s just etched in the brain,” he said.

Throughout the chemotherapy treatment, Mr Crawford said his family was his “rock”, with two sayings displayed near the front door of his home helping him get through the difficult time.

“Our second eldest daughter did up a canvas and it just had painted on it in bright rainbow colours, ‘bring on tomorrow, I’ve got today’, and when I walked out to go to chemo (chemotherapy) that’s what I read,” he said. 

“It brought it all in and it was just like, I can deal with today, let’s just organise tomorrow.”

A picture frame containing a photo of Wayne’s wife, Sarah, and their four children, with the words “our dad, our hero” also gave Mr Crawford strength during his treatment.

“Sarah and the kids just got me through the whole thing … there were days where I just would not want to get out of bed, and Sarah and the kids just gave me the motivation that everything was going to be okay,” Mr Crawford said.

In 2019, Mr Crawford’s children were tested for FAP at The Royal Children’s Hospital, with two out of four of the kids possessing the gene, including Miquela Crawford, who at the age of 21 underwent surgery to remove her large bowel which was completely full of polyps.

“This gene is the same as the breast cancer gene and the ovarian cancer gene, if you find it early you try to prevent cancer,” Mr Crawford said. 

Mr Crawford said since Miquela’s operation she is “doing really good”, has embraced her ileostomy and is extremely proud of who she is.

But there was one more surgery in store for Mr Crawford, with him undergoing a ‘whipple procedure’ at the start of last year to remove the head of his pancreas, the first part of his small intestine (duodenum), his gallbladder, and his bile duct.

“It’s one of the biggest operations a person can go through,” he said.

“That’s all those polyps that have just grown into more and more.

“If the cancer comes back, I’ve got no option, it’s chemotherapy or radiotherapy now, there’s no surgery.”

While it has now been four years since Mr Crawford’s bowel cancer treatment, he said he doesn’t use the word remission because he believes “once you get cancer you’ve always got the cancer, chemo’s just put it to sleep”.

As a member of the community with an ileostomy, Mr Crawford has been speaking with Council in an attempt to get better disabled public toilet facilities locally that are equipped for someone to safely change their stoma, as currently there are none that meet these needs.

For someone to change their stoma, disabled toilets need to have better lighting, more bench space at a reasonable height, a full-length mirror, and be clean and hygienic.

Mr Crawford said change needs to happen so members of the community with an invisible disability such as a stoma feel respected while using disabled toilets, which is currently not the case.

“Not many people know that most people with stomas have been abused for using disabled toilets,” he said.

“We have people staring at us, eye rolling, and screaming actual verbal abuse.

“I’ve been abused for using a disabled toilet and people just yell at you or look at you and go, ‘you don’t look disabled, what the hell’.”

While there has not yet been any change to the local disabled toilet facilities, Mr Crawford hopes he will not have to wait too long for a disabled toilet where he can hygienically and safely change his appliance.

“We just want a basic toilet that’s got a bench and is hygienic, because you’re dealing with your intestines,” he said.

With a recent study revealing one in 10 new cases of bowel cancer in Australia are occurring in people under 50 years old, Mr Crawford is urging anyone with symptoms or a family history of bowel cancer to undergo regular bowel cancer testing regardless of their age.

“When you say bowel, bowel means poo and everyone just goes yuck,” he said.

“There are people out there that get cancer, young people who get cancer, and they’re the ones that need to get screened and checked.

“I know in my case with this gene it ramps it up a 100 per cent, but I think if you get bowel cancer at any age it doesn’t matter how you get it, it’s how you deal with it.”