Life After Treatment

Emotional and practical worries

Bowel Cancer treatment can leave you feeling, tired, battered and emotional. As if that wasn’t enough, you may also have worries about work, finances and relationships. The flip-side is that this experience may have helped you focus on what really matters to you and helped you think about changes you may want to make to the way you live your life.

Support groups can be very useful in linking you up with people who have gone through exactly the same experience. You might find it helpful to join one or two before you make any big changes.

Physical changes

Bowel cancer treatment can result in loss of bowel control. Although this can present challenges to you at work and socially, try not to worry as it should gradually improve. You may need to adapt your diet – try to observe what foods do and don’t work for you so that you can avoid the worst offenders.

Talk to your colorectal care team about when you have follow-up appointments, especially if you are having trouble regaining weight you lost during treatment.

Other physical side effects as a result of treatment include loss of libido (sex drive) and sexual function. This is very common and is usually just temporary.

Follow-up

You are likely to be offered follow-up appointments after your treatment has finished. These may include a CEA blood test that may indicate if the cancer has returned.

You can use these appointment to discuss your overall physical and mental wellbeing as well.