‘I felt like a bystander in my own internal recovery’: one woman’s battle for health after a life-changing diagnosis

Facing an enormous decision about her health filled Kat Lister with wonder at her body’s ability to fight for her

The 2cm wound to the right of my bellybutton had been oozing for days. A syrupy weep in the well of my abdomen. A surgical pothole so small that it felt almost indulgent to photograph it in my bathroom mirror. As if these tiny keyhole incisions dotted around my swollen stomach – one, two, three, four, five of them – bore no relation to the magnitude of the plunder beneath.

Magnitude. Or, should I say: weight. “Do you feel lighter?” a friend asked me a week after I had a total colectomy to save my life. To which I replied (somewhat contradictorily): yes and no. It didn’t take long for my doctors to start referring to my large bowel, laden with more than 400 precancerous polyps, as a “heavy burden” – and I think there is something poetic in that choice of words. A flash of humanity in an otherwise sterile place. Which is where I found myself in May last year, staring numbly at pictures of stoma bags in St Mark’s hospital in north-west London, the only hospital in the world to specialise entirely in intestinal and colorectal medicine.