Brookings native and former SDSU baseball player Billy McMacken never expected to be diagnosed with colorectal cancer at the age of 51.
In May of 2019, the Brookings Register publisher went in for a physical, where his doctor told him that he was overdue for a colonoscopy, recommending that he schedule one as soon as possible.
“Typically, just the way I’m wired, I would have walked out of the office and not scheduled it,” McMacken said. “I logged on to my account and messaged my doctor’s nurse and asked her to schedule a colonoscopy for me.”
That was on a Monday. By 7 a.m. on Thursday, he and his wife were on the way to a colonoscopy appointment.
“By 9 o’clock I had a doctor telling my wife and I that it looked like I had a tumor,” McMacken said.
It would take the doctors until Monday to complete a biopsy. In the meantime, he and his wife headed to a PGA golf tournament in Minneapolis over the weekend.
“It gave us an opportunity for us to be together for a couple of days and talk about ‘What if it's cancer?’ ‘What are we going to do?’” McMacken said. “So really it was just a physical that led to a colonoscopy that led to a sudden, stunning diagnosis.”
By the middle of July, he had his first chemotherapy treatment. A total of seven more would follow.
Following his chemotherapy treatments, McMacken went to radiation treatment for 28 days straight, excluding weekends.
When his radiation treatment was completed in mid-January, his doctor gave him eight weeks to prepare for surgery.
“He said ‘you need to get strong, build your stamina up because you are going to go through a really tough surgery,’” McMacken said. “It was a battle. Just getting to the surgery was a battle.”
In March of 2020, he had an abdominal perennial resection that took almost five hours. He stayed for six days in the hospital.
Surgery was only the beginning of a long road to recovery, but McMacken wants people to know what he learned through his difficult journey:
“There’s a great joy in living that maybe you didn’t have before.”
Next: Billy's recovery and lifestyle changes after surgery.