Over 50 and home on a Saturday night? Have you done your bowel cancer screening test?? (The poo test they send you in the mail).
Saturday night might not seem the most appropriate time to talk about poo, but the problem is, there’s NEVER a great time to talk about it – and that’s one of the reasons bowel cancer is the Australia’s 2nd most deadly form of cancer.
The good news? About 99% of cases can be treated successfully when detected early – and that’s where the poo test comes in.
Every 2 years from age 50 (what a birthday present, hey?!) until age 74, you will be sent a screening kit in the mail. All you need to do is follow the instructions in there and brush a tiny bit of poo onto a card and send it away. Easy, right? The test is looking for invisible traces of blood in the bowel, and although this can come from lots of causes, the most serious one that we don’t want to miss is cancer. So if the test comes back as positive, we recommend you then go on to have a colonoscopy to investigate things further.
Please don’t put this off. The whole point of a screening test is to detect things early – before you have symptoms. We can’t treat what we don’t know about.
