SINGER’S TRAUMA
Act quickly for sake of your health
THE life of a successful opera singer can be hectic: many months of the year are spent travelling, and as for keeping a nineto-five working life and regular mealtimes, it is naturally out of the question.
So when Claire Rutter, a critically acclaimed soprano, first noticed some unusual stomach symptoms, she was quick to attribute them to her erratic schedule.
She was passing a small amount of blood when she visited the lavatory, accompanied by increasingly frequent bouts of diarrhoea and constipation. Preoccupied with her job, in any case, she brushed them off without much thought.
“I was very busy with work and thought: ‘I don’t want to bother my doctor with this – it’s probably stress or poor diet’,” she said.
“If I’m on tour, it’s not always easy to find really healthy foods to eat. You eat in a rush, you eat late at night, so the lifestyle was such that I was blaming my work for my condition.”
But the symptoms persisted and became more regular and, by the autumn of 2016, she was suffering abdominal pains and stomach upsets whenever she ate anything other than very simple foods.
After some two years spent ignoring these signs, she finally decided it was time to see a doctor, whereupon she was initially diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) and possible haemorrhoids.
“IBS seemed to make sense,” she says. “So I tried [a diet] for a couple of months and it made no difference at all. I was still quite unwell.
“I then started to get really poorly, and was having more bouts every day. Every day I was feeling quite ill and tired and rundown and was passing blood.”
A few months later, she returned to her GP surgery.
“I said, ‘My aunt recently died of bowel cancer, aged 90, and I’m worried I’m presenting with the same symptoms. How will I know if it’s bowel cancer or haemorrhoids or IBS?”
It was July 2017, and this time a locum at the practice dispatched her for a colonoscopy straight away. “That’s when they found the tumour,” says Rutter, who at 49 is young for a colorectal cancer case. “By this time it was quite large, and the colorectal specialist was quite surprised the doctor hadn’t sent me for a colonoscopy earlier, knowing my family history.”
She’d been totally unprepared for the result of the procedure, however, and learning the true cause of her symptoms left her stunned.
“I’d honestly thought I was wasting people’s time. When I went along for the colonoscopy I was apologising because I thought: ‘I’m absolutely fine, there’s nothing there, it’s just stomach upsets, it’s stress.’
“I was totally shocked, I absolutely broke down, when I was told it was a tumour. I couldn’t believe it. I just felt I was in some sort of parallel universe.”
The doctors performed a biopsy and in mid-September she was told the tumour was benign but could change.
The consultant told her he would like to remove it as soon as possible, but Rutter had other plans.
“I said: ‘Oh, but I’m off to Iceland next week to sing Tosca for two months!’”
She admits she was “probably completely mad to do this”, but something else had occurred while she was awaiting the biopsy results that influenced her decision to prioritise her work at this time.
“My husband asked for a divorce. So first of all I knew I’d have to go through all this on my own, or with family and friends’ support but not my life partner. I was so upset – devastated is an understatement, we’d been married for 21 years – so I wanted to carry on working because I felt I needed it for my selfesteem.”
So she asked the consultant what would happen if she delayed the operation for a couple of months while she was away.
“He said: ‘It will continue growing and, naturally, I would like to take it out as soon as possible, but ultimately it’s your choice. I think you’ll be okay’.”
And so she decided to take the risk, and was booked in for surgery in late November.
Not wishing to burden her 21year-old son and 19-year-old daughter with worry, she told no one the true reason for the operation.
“At this stage, I thought: ‘It’s benign, it’s not going to kill me’,” she says.
“I don’t regret waiting, but I know it was a gamble.”
And indeed it was: by the time the surgeons removed the tumour and examined it, they found the cells had started to change and were showing “a minute amount of cancerous growth”.
“I was very shocked,” says Rutter, who knows she was lucky, nonetheless. The medics managed to remove the tumour in its entirety and believed it to have been contained.”
She is now “feeling 100% – much better than I have done in years” and has thrown herself back into her work.
But her experience has left her determined to warn others against ignoring symptoms as she did, or being too embarrassed to discuss them.
“Our embarrassment is killing us,” she says, firmly.
“It could have been so much worse for me if I hadn’t pushed for the colonoscopy.”
It could also have been a very different outcome had she not overcome her embarrassment: when she first plucked up the courage to see her GP, she still prevaricated during the appointment, spending the bulk of it discussing a problem with her foot and only mentioning, as if as an afterthought, the bowelrelated symptoms she’d been experiencing.
“Bowel or colorectal cancer is a very unglamorous cancer, and people don’t like to talk about it,” she says.
But talk about it we must. Surveys have found that only a small percentage of people visit their doctors the first time they notice blood in their stools.
Others have not been as lucky as Rutter.
If left too late it is not uncommon for the cancer to spread to the liver and lymph nodes.
Bowel cancer symptoms are fairly common, and most people who experience the symptoms do not actually have cancer, but other problems.
However, says Rutter, it’s important to get them checked out.
“I just want people to heed the warning signs and not ignore them. People think they’re bothering their doctor, they think it’s nothing, when actually anything that goes on for weeks or months, any stomach upsets, stomach pains that you can’t attribute to diet, you need to get sorted out.”
KEY SIGNS OF BOWEL CANCER: The three main symptoms are:
● Persistent blood in your stools that has no obvious cause
● A persistent change in your bowel habit, which in most cases means moving your bowels more often and your stools being looser
● Persistent pain in the lower abdominal area, bloating or discomfort caused by eating. This may also be accompanied by loss of appetite or significant unintentional weight loss.
While persistent symptoms should be checked by a doctor, all are fairly common and in most cases will not be caused by cancer. But that is not a given. —