Two years ago I found out i had stage 3 bowel cancer, i had no real symptoms i didn’t feel ill or tired nor was i losing weight the only symptom was i had two small blood clots thats all , i went to the doctors just a few days before Christmas he gave me a FIT test which i did that day , it came back just after Christmas and was over 160 , i was sent to a consultant a little while after, he arranged a colonoscopy along with CT scan , i had the colonoscopy and thats when i found out i had bowel cancer, i had an operation about middle of march which took 6 hours and removed part of my bowel i was left with a stoma bag , the surgeons who preformed the operation were brilliant i had no pain from the operation other than aching shoulders caused by the Anaesthesia, i was in hospital for about 8 days ended up having a tube down my nose to clear my stomach it wasn’t great , getting used to the stoma bag took a while, but by the time i came home i had it sorted , i came home and felt a bit run down after the operation, a couple of months later i was told i would need 3 months of chemotherapy which consisted of a morning having a chemo infusion and taking home some tablets, the chemo wasn’t great but it is doable, it makes you feel tired i think it was 14 days of tablets with a week off then repeat, the only thing my chemo was the bottoms of my feet which sort of felt puffy, things improve after you finish the chemo, then i settled down to it being me and my stoma bag i soon got the hang of doing it , about a year later ( 2 years in total ) i had a stoma reversal which all went well but for about 10 weeks it was hell on earth i was in hospital for a week and started to think i should have just kept my stoma bag i couldn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel and even got C diff which i had antibiotics for , but literally it got better as fast as it came , and  the ten weeks of hell were worth it in the end , i would advise anyone to have a stoma reversal if it is offered as now i don’t look back and the stoma is a distant memory , and the surgeons were incredible 

i am writing this to give people who have just been diagnosed with bowel cancer  an insight to what they might expect, bowel cancer is scary when you are first told about it,  and it might help with what they might expect, but i do know people are different , if anyone has any questions i will do my best to answer them based on my experiences