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I’ve cancelled a few gym memberships in my time. You may recognise how it goes. Sign up. Get a program done. Work out. Ache in new places. Go back. Feel better. Start to feel great. Think to yourself, wow this is wonderful, I really should have done this before.
Then, it gets busy at work. You catch a cold. It’s raining. You miss a few days. Somehow the missing of those days makes it easier to skip a few more. A week passes. Then two. The gym is, of course, still charging you, and paying for nothing starts to hurt. This hurt reminds you of the pain in store when you finally drag your withering muscles back. Three weeks pass. A month. You see your bank statement. You cancel your membership.
OK, so I’m back at the gym again. But it’s different this time. No, really it is.
In April last year I did the bowel cancer screening test sent out in the mail. To my shock – I had no symptoms – it came back positive. A colonoscopy followed, revealing a two-centimetre tumour. Within two weeks I was in surgery to cut out a decent section of my bowel. Still in a post-surgery daze, I was given the diagnosis: stage 3 bowel cancer. I was 54. This wasn’t part of the plan.
After the surgery, my bowel went to sleep. This complication, called ileus, isn’t uncommon and usually sorts itself out within two or three days. But for some reason – I have a lazy bowel? – this stretched out to seven days for me.
These were dark days. I wasn’t able to eat (there was nowhere for the food to go), I felt incredibly sick and the weight was dropping off me. And mentally and emotionally, I was trying to come to terms with the news that I might be dying.
During the day, my wife and family were by my side. They saved me. But the nights in hospital were long. It’s hard to sleep when you haven’t eaten for a week, you have one tube down your throat sucking up bile, another tube in your side draining a surgery wound and an arm hooked up to an IV. And try getting up for a pee!
Others have had it much worse. I know that. But still, your mind goes to some pretty dark places when it’s 4am and you’re almost wishing for the nurse to visit and take your vitals just to not feel quite so alone.
Staring at the ceiling, I thought about death. But I also thought about life. And you realise that all those cliches about health being the only thing that matters are entirely true. The only reason they are cliches is because thousands of years of human experience have proven them right. It is a truth that has become light and airy through repetition, making us forget just how heavy and foundational it really is. Everything is secondary to health.
Flat out on that hospital bed with barely the energy to roll over, I thought of exercise. Movement seemed less like a chore or burdensome obligation, and more like a beautiful dream. I told myself never to forget this feeling if I managed to get out of here.
Chemotherapy followed. It was about as fun as it sounds. I had little energy, but eventually, slow walks with the dogs returned. It felt like opening a small window to life on the other side.
Towards the end of my treatment, my oncologist mapped out what came next. Surveillance scans, of course. My cancer could recur any time in the next five years. But she also said get to the gym, and told me about a recent study that has been a game-changer in the treatment of bowel cancer.
The global study, commonly known as the Challenge trial, found that a consistent exercise regime involving 150 minutes of moderate physical activity a week resulted in a 28 per cent lower risk of cancer recurrence, and a 37 per cent lower risk of death, compared to standard post-treatment care. As my oncologist put it to me, the survival benefits of exercise were in a similar range to that of chemotherapy itself.
That exercise might quite literally save my life seemed like a fair motivation to lace up my runners. But looking around me at others in their 50s and older, I felt like what I was being told was in some ways just an extreme version of what everyone is being told. Get moving, because the consequences of remaining sedentary can be devastating.
None of which is to say that cancer won’t still have its brutal way. It takes out the fit and healthy, caring not at all for who did everything right. It has no morals or mercy. My scans so far have been good, but I know this cancer could still kill me, whether I exercise or not. A line from a Paul Kelly song echoes in my head: “Death doesn’t care just who it destroys”.
But as humans, we do what we can to tilt the scales. To improve our chances. So I go to the gym, and I don’t plan on letting my membership lapse. On the days I struggle for motivation, I remember those nights staring up at the hospital ceiling, when every minute felt like an hour. Suddenly, being on the treadmill feels like a gift. Stride after stride after stride. And it’s a gift in the here and now, whatever may come.
Simon Castles is an Age producer.
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