About 61 per cent of the kits distributed are never used, the Health Departments says. That was me. I chucked mine out because I thought what's the likelihood I'd get bowel cancer?

Yet I was the queen of pap smears. So regular, so efficient. And finally, after decades, one came back a little dodgy. As is the fashion now, I was told to wait to see if the dodgy bits disappeared. Instead, they turned from bad to worse and I ended up having a hysterectomy. Which at my age was fine. My uterus had done a brilliant job of cooking three babies and, Lord knows, I was sick to death of periods.

That was my first experience of a positive screening test. And although I wept and gnashed my teeth, I pushed ahead.

Mammograms? You betcha. Squishing copious breasts between two flat plates is no fun but it's a useful way of checking whether you have breast cancer. That, too, came back as a positive test four years ago but, on further examination, me on the bed, breast specialist having a poke around, all good. I'm due for another look this year.

But the one test I've always avoided is the screening for bowel cancer.

A few weeks before Christmas, the utterly handsome and extremely svelte Anton Enus wrote on Facebook he'd been diagnosed with bowel cancer. Enus, a senior journalist and newsreader at SBS, found out just before Christmas. Of all the myths about bowel cancer I had in my mind, one was that people who looked and behaved like Enus, trim and bustling with energy, did not get the disease.

So that diagnosis sat in the back of my mind. Embarrassingly, I ran into him at a concert not long ago after and spent the few minutes before the music began grilling him. Sometimes I have no manners.

To be honest, I wouldn't usually describe myself as squeamish or frightened. I sat with both my mother and my sister as they died in difficult ways. I don't faint at the sight of blood or childbirth, and have no trouble with spiders or snakes.

But the whole testing-my-poo thing wasn't exactly how I wanted to spend my days. I kept putting it off. And putting it off. I was a woman with no history in my family. I eat kilos of vegetables a week. I exercise like a madwoman.

Basically, all avoidance techniques. So because of Enus, I took myself off to the GP. I expected him to be psychic. I sat in the doctor's office and willed him to ask me about bowel cancer screening. It took him a few minutes to figure out what the hell I was doing there but, boy genius that he is, he eventually pulled out the dreaded kit. It took me a further few days to actually complete the test, deliver it to the GP and wait for the results.

The GP's receptionist rang early one morning, asking if I could pop in later that afternoon. Don't panic, she said. Hahaha.

Three weeks later, I now know I don't have bowel cancer. The blood in my poo has to do with internal haemorrhoids (too much information? Bad luck, keep reading) and isn't that the best news ever? I now know that every three years I will be headed for a colonoscopy, which is really a very unpleasant experience but much more pleasant than murderous bowel cancer. Plus, you need to fast and purge for 36 hours and drink something that smells like citrus-scented floor cleaner and tastes so, so foul. But after it's all over, you get a chicken sandwich and a cup of instant coffee. And that will be the most delicious meal you've ever had in your life. The day I went for my colonoscopy, not a single person in the post-procedure area had bowel cancer.

But the facts are that of those who have a follow-up colonoscopy after a positive faecal occult blood test, just over 4 per cent have bowel cancer, another 23 per cent have an advanced adenoma, and 25 per cent will have a precancerous growth called a non-advanced adenoma. The likelihood of finding bowel cancer is 12 to 40 times greater in someone who tests positive for this test.

I rang the brilliant Stephanie Bansemer-Brown from Bowel Cancer Australia. I wanted facts and figures but far more interesting was her story. She is a stage-3 bowel cancer survivor at 46. Nothing about her looks or sounds like a person who should get bowel cancer but, five years ago, she was getting weird symptoms and her darling bossy sister insisted she take the test.

I asked her about whether the icky factor was the reason people were put off. She wasn't putting up with my whingeing for one little moment. "Even more icky is having an ileostomy bag and being poked and prodded in every orifice."

Anyhow, the good news is that Enus finished his chemotherapy and radiotherapy a couple of weeks ago. He thinks bowel cancer screening might just have saved his life.

So get the kit and use it. If you have symptoms, go straight to the doctor. Don't wait. Poking around in your own poo is not nearly as bad as the alternative.

Jenna Price is a columnist for The Canberra Times and Daily Life, and a senior lecturer in journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Twitter: @JennaPrice

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