HEALTH|EXPERIENCE|CANCER

I Have Colon Cancer

So what next?

Image from Petr Kratochvil on , edited by the author

When actress Kirstie Alley died of colon cancer in 2022, I wrote a story about my mom; about my family and our history of cancer, especially colon cancer. I recently learned from a cousin I’ve never met in person that some of the family refer to it as “the Maitland curse.”

Lynch Syndrome

It isn’t that cancer runs in my family, though. It’s that the propensity to develop cancer runs in my family on my mother’s side. It turns out that some of us have something called Lynch Syndrome, which is caused by a genetic mutation that makes one more likely to develop colorectal, endometrial, and other cancers like stomach, small intestine, pancreas, bile duct, urinary tract, and brain cancers.

Not everyone in a family inherits the genetic mutation that causes Lynch Syndrome. I know for certain that one of my cousins has it. It’s fairly likely my mother had it. Mom once told us that she had a genetic test that indicated that she was susceptible to cancer. She didn’t have a name for it.

The condition was called “hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer” until 1984, when it was renamed after Dr. Henry Lynch of Creighton University Medical Center. Dr. Lynch studied a group of families with a high incidence of colorectal and…