The first turbaned-Sikh MLA Aman Singh (Richmond-Queensborough) is undergoing treatment to fight colon cancer and remains optimistic that he will triumph over it. Singh said he was diagnosed with colon cancer after undergoing the routine screening recommended by the BC Cancer Agency for people aged 50 and up, reported Richmond Record newspaper.

RICHMOND – The first turbaned-Sikh MLA Aman Singh (Richmond-Queensborough) is undergoing treatment to fight colon cancer and remains optimistic that he will triumph over it.

Singh said he was diagnosed with colon cancer after undergoing the routine screening recommended by the BC Cancer Agency for people aged 50 and up, reported Richmond Record newspaper.

“No symptoms,” he said. “Completely healthy. All my blood work has been fine for the last little while, and this time as well. Then, there was just an anomaly, some blood in the stool. That was in May of this year.”

Singh was eventually told that the mass on the colon was cancerous. It’s suspected cancer may also be in the lymph nodes as well, as they’re enlarged.

“I really want to stress that it’s really important to stay healthy, and that (people) go out and they get tested. We have that opportunity; let’s use this because you never know,” he said. “If I hadn’t have gone, I would never have known and it would have advanced so much farther.”

Singh’s treatment plan includes radiation and chemotherapy, followed by surgery. His five radiation sessions in a “Star Trekkie” machine took place at the end of October.

Singh told the Record in a zoom interview last week he was feeling “pretty tired,” after having had his second chemotherapy treatment a week earlier. From the end of October until March 25, 2022, he will be getting chemotherapy every three weeks.

“The chemo is quite hard. It leaves you with a general sense of malaise all the time. The nausea is pretty intense with the medication,” he said. “I missed a few days in the legislature but I wanted to be there as much as I could, which I was able to.”

Once his chemotherapy is finished at the end of March, Singh and his doctors will discuss what type of surgery is needed.

Singh was elected as the Richmond-Queensborough MLA in the Oct. 24, 2020 provincial election.

 “I thought that it was important that I tell my constituents,” he said. “Someone told me one day that my brand was transparency. I think seeing how being transparent about my addiction and how it may have helped some other people.”

Singh said a key component of his recovery journey was to show others there was hope for recovery – and he’s looking to do the same with his latest battle.

“Hope is probably the biggest gift we have,” he said. “When I first started going to recovery meetings, AA meetings, that’s the first thing I glommed onto was hope because I could see that. I could see someone with a week of sobriety or a year, and I was like, ‘OK, there is hope here. People survive. That’s the same thing with cancer: people survive.”

Courtesy Richmond Record