A green-fingered grandad discovered he had bowel cancer after struggling to do the gardening for more than three minutes at a time.<\/p>\n
At first, David Haddaway, from Ramsgate, thought the difficulties were due to his lung condition, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), becoming aggravated.<\/p>\n
David Haddaway has survived his bowel cancer diagnosis whereas his father died from it. Picture: EKHUFT<\/p>\n
But tests revealed the 73-year-old had a bleeding tumour in his bowel – dangerously depleting his red blood cells.<\/p>\n
Mr Haddaway has now become one of the first Kent patients to have part of the organ removed and reconnected inside his body.<\/p>\n
His father had the same cancer and was diagnosed at the same age, but died two years later.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel very lucky indeed,\u201d Mr Haddaway said.<\/p>\n
The vintage postcard dealer, who has six granddaughters, was diagnosed after feeling increasingly unwell and being unable to walk more than 100 metres.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Mr Haddaway had his surgery at the QEQM in Margate<\/p>\n
He added: \u201cI love gardening but I couldn\u2019t do it for more than three minutes, and I was having to get people in to do the jobs for me.<\/p>\n
\u201cInitially, they thought it was my COPD worsening, but it wasn\u2019t that.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I had all the tests, that\u2019s when they found a tumour in my bowel and it was bleeding and had been for a while.\u201d<\/p>\n
His blood count had dropped to critically low levels.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wouldn\u2019t have lasted much longer without treatment,\u201d Mr Haddaway added.<\/p>\n
He was recently treated at the QEQM Hospital in Margate using a new technique known as intracorporeal anastomosis.<\/p>\n
Performed by colorectal surgeon Mohamed Boshnaq, it is more technically demanding but involves a smaller incision and faster recovery.<\/p>\n
Mr Haddaway said: \u201cMr Boshnaq mentioned it would be a new procedure but I wasn\u2019t worried.<\/p>\n
\u201cEverything happened so quickly and it was amazing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had no pain at all after the surgery and it all felt very easy. Now I have these tiny little scars but otherwise you wouldn\u2019t know at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr Boshnaq said the high-level laparoscopic technique involves reconnecting the bowel inside the abdomen, rather than being pulled through a larger incision to be joined outside – known as extracorporeal anastomosis.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhile many hospitals perform keyhole surgery for colon cancer, performing the anastomosis entirely intracorporeally is technically demanding.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost district general hospitals in the south east still perform extracorporeal anastomosis.<\/p>\n
\u201cQEQM is one of the first in Kent and the wider south east to adopt the technique for right-sided colonic resections.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A green-fingered grandad discovered he had bowel cancer after struggling to do the gardening for more than three…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1006189,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[11],"tags":[105,609,495,83509,1510,16,15],"class_list":["post-1006188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health","tag-human-interest","tag-kent","tag-syndicate","tag-thanet","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116695389159635388","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1006188"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006188\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1006189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1006188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1006188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1006188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}