Northlander Britta Conrad is counting her lucky stars she took a simple bowel screening test that probably saved her life. Now the 64-year-old Mangawhai resident wants to spread the word about testing for the deadly disease during Bowel Cancer Awareness Month this June. Her message to fellow Northlanders is: “Don’t hesitate or procrastinate, just do it and be well”.
“I didn’t have any symptoms, but I did it anyway,” she said. “This is what I recommend to everybody; do the self-screening test. “I did it because it was offered to me although I didn’t have any issues .
.. turned out I had bowel cancer.
” Conrad, a flax weaving artist, said she has a healthy diet, grows her vegetables and buys organic when she can, and does regular exercise. The bowel screening test, which is free to New Zealanders aged 60 to 74 years, was sitting around for several weeks before she got around to doing it in February. When the test came back positive, she had to undergo a colonoscopy, which found a small tumour.
Then she had a CT scan to see if the tumour had spread, followed by a meeting with the specialist who would do her surgery. She had her operation on April 15. “I didn’t expect that at all,” she said.
“Everything went really quickly. “They found it was really small, we caught it at an early stage.” New Zealand has one of the highest rates of bowel cancer in the world.
More than 3000 people are diagnosed with bowel cancer each year and more than 1200 will die f.
