16 hours Ago By Sarah Berry
Brendan Moynihan describes himself as very fit and healthy. “I played competitive sports all my life, and typically, I run four mornings a week,” says the 40-year-old Irishman who works in marketing. Doctors dismissed Brendan Moynihan as too young to have a “serious” health issue.
Credit: Simon Schluter So it was unusual when, in August 2022, Moynihan found himself unable to run more than one kilometre without needing to stop – he felt “zapped”. A visit to his GP in Melbourne proved unhelpful. “I was dismissed as being just too young for anything serious,” he recalls.
“He said I was probably just run down.” Moynihan took the doctor’s word for it and put his tiredness down to poor sleep. But two months later, he felt even more exhausted, and there was now blood in his stools.
Moynihan returned to his GP and, this time, was told he likely had haemorrhoids. No further investigation was ordered. If it weren’t for the fact that running was his stress relief – and he was now too tired to run at all – he might have accepted the doctor’s words once again.
But he couldn’t bear the thought of losing his outlet. So he scheduled an appointment with a new doctor, who immediately ordered blood tests, then a colonoscopy. At 5.
30pm on Christmas Eve, 2022, Moynihan met with the surgeon and was told he had stage 2 bowel cancer. Within two weeks he had surgery to remove about half of his large colon..
