I awoke this morning to the news that former Bush White House spokesman and oft times Fox News guest and Fox News Sunday anchor, Tony Snow, had lost his battle with colon cancer. It was a particularly poignant and personal moment for me, having been diagnosed with the same illness on August 9th of last year. It's difficult to express the emotions that flooded over me. Cancer is an illness that is unforgiving and largely unrelenting, but one that need not be fatal. Colon cancer may be the least acknowledged in America, yet it will affect one in four of us. If detected in it's earliest stage, a simple polypectomy can stop it. If not, treatment generally begins with chemotherapy and radiation and culminates in surgery. Conventional wisdom is that everyone should be screened for colon cancer with a colonoscopy after age 50. Unfortunately, more and more people are being diagnosed in their 30s and 40s and this word is NOT getting out. If their is a history of colon cancer in your family, I urge you to get tested anually, regardless of your age. As with any cancer, the medical profession really does not know the cause. My anecdotal experience has been that the protocol of chemo-radiation-surgery, or what I call the "cookie cutter" approach, while expedient for the doctors, is probably not always the best thing for the patient. The sword of Damocles that they dangle over a patient's head is "if you don't have the surgery, the cancer will probably come back." Tony HAD the surgery. Most patients do. Some "survive" ("survival" in medical terminology means you live another five years minimum, even if you die at the five year and one day mark.) many do not survive, after going through multiple surgeries and round after round of chemotherapy. My beef with the medical profession is that it has made no real progress in treating this illness in decades. It still involves having surgery that usually results in a permanent colostomy. I find this totally unacceptable in the 21st Century and I have continued to refuse the surgery. Great strides have been made in the battles against breast cancer and prostate cancer, the "big two" as I like to call them, because most money, publicity and research got to them. It's political, like so many other things. Sorry to leave you on such a somber note today, but if I have at least made you consider getting screened for colon cancer, or learning more about it, it was worth it, for both of us.