My Experience:

I’ve had small amounts of bright red blood on my stool for years. I had always dismissed this finding because I’m young with a horrible diet.

I have always been taught that black stool is the worrisome stool, as that’s indicative of upper gastrointestinal bleeding, whereas stool that has bright blood just indicates hemorrhoids.

My logic for dismissing the bright blood on my stool:

- I’ve had a diet consisting of high sugar + high fat, processed foods with low fiber in addition to being very inactive causing constipation and straining – So, bleeding from straining just “made sense”. I’m 6’1 @ 225

- Blood was not consistent-- It came and went.

- There was not a lot of blood, and when there was it looked like skid marks on the stool (something I thought was “obviously” related to hemorrhoids

- I’m young (29)

- Family history of hemorrhoids, so I thought me having hemorrhoids was just part of the family business

- Lack of education – especially knowledge relating to polyps (an abnormal tissue formation resembling a skin tag in the colon).

Why I eventually met with a GI specialist:

The blood in my stool became more of an everyday thing that lasted for a month. From my perspective, that frequency was abnormal.

My GI doctor thought it was more than likely hemorrhoids, but still recommended a colonoscopy because no matter what, blood in stool, especially in young adults, is not normal should ALWAYS be inspected.

What was found from the colonoscopy:

A 20mm polyp. To put in perspective, a 10mm polyp is considered big. The polyp was sent to pathology and in a few days I received a call.

Pathology:

They discovered that cancer had formed on the polyp. It’s more of a rare cancer (<1% of colon cancers) that is unfortunately a bit more aggressive than the average colon cancer. At this point, I’m had been staged at stage 3a. After getting part of my colon (large intestine) removed and six weeks later, I will now be starting chemotherapy in five days. The doctors do feel I have an 80-90% chance of being cured with chemo’s assistance.

But what’s more interesting about this cancer is that it is most common in younger people (around later 20s-30s).

The doctors mentioned that they are seeing colon cancer arise more often in young people.

TL;DR: If you have blood in your stool, you more than likely do NOT have colon cancer. But you should get yourself checked by a doctor if you are having this symptom just to make sure there is nothing going on.

Super interesting article on Steph’s conditioning: https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/30742095/how-stephen-curry-organized-chaos-fuels-record-breaking-career-golden-state-warriors-rebuild

Some other relevant quotes:

For Curry, a typical offseason workout looks something like this: Sporting a hilarious golfer's tan and usually some kind of colorful, prototype Under Armour sneaker, Curry flies through a nearly impossible, full-court version of the conventional star shooting drill. Designed by Payne, it consists of 10 shots -- from the corner, baseline and wing -- with full-court 94-foot sprints in between. And it must be done with a minimum 80% accuracy and in under 56 seconds or the drill repeats. Essentially it's the same drill run in nearly every basketball practice on earth, turbocharged to an absurd degree for Curry, whose year-round conditioning goal is to always be ready to take the floor within two weeks.

Last offseason, when Curry did this workout at Stanford, several Division I players in attendance begged to join in on Payne's ultimate scoring-without-the-ball drill -- they all either collapsed from exhaustion or gave up halfway through. That's exactly what Payne expects, though, since the drill is designed specifically to challenge Curry's remarkable conditioning and unique skill set in order to prepare him for challenges like the one against Portland.

"Steph's definition of conditioning is different than most," Payne says. "Lots of guys are in great shape. Can you be in the kind of great shape where you are fatigued after a long play like this and your quads are burning and you can't breathe but you can still maintain perfect mechanics and still make good decisions? Are you fatigued but can still execute at the highest levels? Because that's what truly matters.

I was walking my dog alone on a path and a guy exercising was walking towards me. As he approached he said hi and let me know that “This is my turnaround spot. Just so I don’t freak you out coming up behind you.” Sure enough, he went about 30 more feet and suddenly turned around to start walking the same direction as me. As he passed me again, he complimented my dog and that was that.

I thanked him for letting me know but I REALLY appreciated him telling me that. I definitely would have been on edge if I didn’t know why he did that. I think that’s the first time (in my experience) that a guy has been aware of how something like that can make a woman uncomfortable.