I was diagnosed with anal cancer in September of 2022. I thought it was my hemorrhoids acting up. I saw my gastroenterologist. I told them I felt like I was sitting on a golf ball. Even with a cushion, I couldn’t sit comfortably. After weeks of back and forth he finally did a sigmoidoscopy. When I woke up and saw his face, he looked like he saw a ghost. My tumor was that large. Almost the size of a tennis ball. I was referred to a radiologist and oncologist. I had one dose of Mytomicin and Xeloda for 5 days a week for 6 weeks. I had radiation at the same time. I think I did pretty well with the chemo. The hardest part of that was forcing myself to eat something before I took the 5 pills 2X a day. The burns from the radiation is what really affected me the most. The pain was excruciating. We bought a bidet that fit on our toilet and that really helped. My stomach was another story. I suffered from radiation enteritis from the second week of treatment until recently. Now I am left with little control over my sphincter muscle. In 2 weeks I will have a CAT scan to see if the treatment helped. It has been an extremely difficult time waiting for these results. I don’t know what’s ahead of me. I am doing my best to remain positive.