Hi MrsBlueSky and thank you for your post.

I’m sorry to read about your bowel cancer diagnosis.

I can appreciate it can be worrying when a test that was normal before, shows something different 2 years later.

The best people to ask any questions to, about your own cancer diagnosis, is always your hospital team. They are specialists in bowel cancer and its behaviour and know about your own history. However, what I can say is that most bowel cancers grow slowly, over a 5–10 year period. Sometimes, cancers can grow faster if the cancer cell is a higher grade.

A Dukes B (Stage II) tumour means that your cancer has grown through the muscle layer of the bowel wall, but has not yet spread to the lymph nodes. It is difficult to say how long this may have been there for you, but again do speak to your doctor about this.

There are no singular tests for any types of cancer. What we do have are some screening tools and different types of tests and investigations that help build a picture of what is going on in the body. This means the bowel screening for example is not a cancer test but a test that looks at whether there is any presence of blood in poo, which can be present in cancer.

If the amount of blood is over an expected range then a colonoscopy test is triggered. This helps the doctors see and biopsy what, of the many different bowel conditions, may have caused the bleeding in this instance. For a majority the reason is not cancer.

Unfortunately in some situations the bowel cancer does not bleed, or the bleeding is not enough to trigger a positive FIT test. It seems that your bowel cancer may not have been bleeding at the time you took your FIT test. So your result at the time wasn't positive.

I understand that this must have been difficult to hear, but I hope this makes things clearer.

I also hope you recover well.

Please get back to us if you need any more information or support

It might help to talk things through with one of our nurses on the helpline. You can call for free on 0808 800 4040, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm.

Kind regards

Tina