Standup comic Brenda Elsagher was once voted the funniest woman in the Twin Cities. Calling her doctor the “rear admiral”, she’s featured in a TV report on colorectal cancer on WCCO, Minneapolis talking about the importance of colonoscopies and colorectal cancer prevention.
Brenda is a research advocate for C3 and weaves colorectal cancer prevention and survivorship messages into her comedy routines, her motivational speaking, and a regular blog.
Diagnosed in her thirties, Brenda has a colostomy that she talks about freely and with humor. In If the Battle is Over Why am I Still in Uniform: Humor as a Survival Tactic to Combat Cancer she discusses her journey with colon cancer, her ostomy, and how laughter helped her come to terms and cope.
She collected the stories of over eighty people affected by ostomies — ostomates, caregivers, medical professionals — in I’d Like to Buy a Bowel Please.
In addition to her work with C3, she is active with the United Ostomy Association of Minneapolis and is part of the NCI Consumer Advocates in Research and Related Activities (CARRA) program.
Leave a Reply
Your comments are welcome. However, specific medical advice will not be provided, and we urge you to consult with a qualified physician for diagnosis and for answers to your personal questions. FightCRC is not responsible for the medical accuracy of any comments left by persons other than FightCRC staff members. FightCRC staff members monitor comments and may respond publicly where appropriate.
Please note that we automatically publish the name that you enter next to your post. Also note that our pages are automatically indexed by Google and other search engines, and your name may therefore appear in search results on those sites. So if you wish to remain anonymous please use a different name or enter 'Anon' as the name.
We regret that we are unable to privately answer questions left as comments. So please do not include your phone number, email or mailing address in the body of your comment. For the best personal and direct response to your colorectal cancer treatment questions, please call our Answer Line at 1-877-4CRC-111 (1-877-427-2111).