Adam Hamilton has outlined his torrid battle with bowel cancer in a must-listen Racing Pulse segment, with the Victorian trots journalist urging all to stay tuned to their bodies and seek medical advice.
In the wake of successful surgery and the all-clear from surgeons, the TAB Head Of Media Communications stepped through his challenging but successful battle with bowel cancer with RSN 927's Michael Felgate this morning.
"Tremendously pleased to get the all clear," Hamilton said. "A couple of weeks back from the operation and, really, only a couple of weeks away from consigning this to a deep, dark chapter, but one that has just been a chapter along the way and will be history."
Hamilton detailed the diagnosis, treatment and surgery, lauding the work of medical professionals at Epworth and Peter McCallum Cancer Centre.
“The surgeon is cutting edge – his name is Satish Warrier, he basically said from the start it looks relatively advanced, but I’ve got this, I’ve seen examples like this before and if we go through the process, round of chemo over six to eight weeks, a break, then another round of chemo and radiation together over another six weeks I think that will make a huge impact on it. Ideal world is you fall into the 15 per cent of people who are cured or treated properly by those treatments and then when we open you up and take out the affected areas the cancer is gone.
“I count myself as absolutely being in that incredibly lucky category because that’s exactly what happened when they opened me up on the 23rd of Feb, they took out the affected section of the bowel, which had a lot of scarring, they took out the supportive wall alongside of the bowel, which he was worried it had started to move into, and they took out five accompanying lymph nodes down the side of that wall as well."
Hamilton urged all to listen to their bodies and proactively seek check-ups, in particular a colonscopy from age 40.
“What has shone through out of the people I have spoken to through the process, 40 is the new 50 with bowel cancer. Well done to the Government sending out the test at 50, but it’s so slow growing starting out with polyps and then developing into radical cells and then developing into cancers. The surgeon said I may well have had mine five to eight years, starting from a very small, irregular cell in a polyp developing into a clear, functioning cancer. If I had have had a test done in my early 40s I probably wouldn’t have had the issues that I had to deal with.”
CLICK BELOW TO WATCH A VIDEO OF THE INTERVIEW:
CLICK BELOW FOR A PODCAST OF THE INTERVIEW: