Dave Hegerty with his son
Dave Hegerty considered himself a typically healthy and fairly fit 43 year-old male when he decided that it was time to bundle up that list of what he considered a few “minor health issues” and to see his GP.
That skin growth on his neck? Probably just a mole. That blood he’d been noticing in his bowel motions for a few weeks? Nah, must just be haemorrhoids.
“Well didn’t I get a massive shock when it turned out to be ‘not just nothing’. I got two cancer diagnoses in one day – melanoma and colorectal cancer!” Dave recalls.
“It blew me away. I had gone in for a colonoscopy with Professor Andrew Stevenson after being referred to him by my GP and they discovered a tumour during the procedure. As it turned out I had organised to go back and see the skin specialist and Professor Stevenson on the same day and I got the results of both biopsies on the same day and in both cases, they were cancer.
“That was the bad news. The good news was that they got the melanoma before it was too far gone and the tumour in my bowel thankfully hadn’t spread to my lymph nodes.”
What followed in 2020 was bowel surgery followed by six rounds of chemotherapy – then two years later, further surgery on his liver as the cancer had metasticised to that organ, sending him down another dark road of recovery followed by the more inspirational path to living each day to its fullest.
Dave hadn’t been aware of any family history of colorectal cancer – although once he started to enquire a bit further, he learned that his grandfather had been diagnosed with bowel cancer when he was in his 80s.
With Dave’s diagnosis providing a new chapter in the family history, he sounded the warning to his three brothers and insisted they all line up for their own colonoscopy. While two brothers got a clean bill of health, it proved to be life-changing advice for younger brother Liam, then aged 39, when doctors discovered two large polyps, one of which was an early invasive bowel cancer.
Dave Hegerty undergoing chemotherapy
Professor Andrew Stevenson
Professor Stevenson recommended that people undergo further examination, initially with their GP, at the first sign of symptoms – which could either be blood in their stool or irregular bowel movements which had occurred over an extended period (3-4 weeks).
Bleeding was the most common symptom – it is also often associated with haemorrhoids – but it can also often be a sign that that the issue is starting to progress towards the cancer stage or cancer is possibly already present.
You can have a test which can detect blood in your stool and which also can measure your red blood cell count - with a low count common in people with bowel cancer. A home fecal occult test, which involves taking a stool sample at home (free for over 50s and otherwise available for purchase at a pharmacy), is another common and reliable form of test.
“Age really isn’t a discriminating factor for colorectal cancer as I’ve had patients as young as 13 although if they are younger there tends to be a familial history and that’s where we see people diagnosed in their 20s and 30s,” says Professor Stevenson.
Liam Hegerty says he’ll be forever grateful for that conversation on the sidelines of a junior soccer match while watching their sons play – where his older brother Dave urged him to get a colonoscopy after Dave’s shock diagnosis.
“It was a shock for me as well that they found several polyps but it was great that they got them early,” says Liam. “And in fact with me, it was probably too early for me to have had symptoms so I was very lucky that through Dave’s diagnosis, my diagnosis was early enough, that I didn’t have to undergo any follow up treatment like chemo.
“Professor Stevenson was fantastic and overall it was very good experience being treated by him and being a patient at St Vincent’s Hospital Northside where all the staff were terrific, very compassionate and very professional.”
Liam Hegerty with his family
