A lot of people are talking about Satoru Iwata skipping E3 this year.  If Nintendo is in a dire situation, surely the President of the company can make time to speak at the worlds largest electronics event.

By Robert Graves

Last year, the President of Nintendo was asked not to attend E3 due to medical issues. Many of us speculated what it could be, from an ear infection to cancer. Today we learned a tumor was blocking his bile ducts. Thankfully, the tumor was noncancerous.

Unfortunately I have personal experience with the other kind. My own mother was diagnosed with colon cancer, which metastasized and entered her blood. Due to the location of the cancer, it spread quickly to the liver. She passed away, but I can impart some of the learned knowledge onto the reader.

You know that the liver is used to clean your body system. Now, consider the liver as a city. There are channels that move matter from one end of the liver and out the other. Some channels are larger, like highways. As a city has highways and surface roads, so does the liver.

If a tumor or cancerous growth gets into these ducts, a blockage occurs. Think of a wreck on the highway, and remember that its ok to take the surface streets to get around the wreck. As the tumor or cancer progresses, more and more highways become blocked. Bile backs up and soon even the surface streets become overwhelmed. The liver is now failing. Jaundice will be present causing the patient to become yellow in color. The kidneys will try to take some of the stress of the liver, but they don’t work near as hard as the liver does. One by one the filter organs will fail and the person will die.

Thankfully, Iwata’s tumor was removed and noncancerous. As a doctor once told me, “so much depends on our ability to use the bathroom.” Hopefully my experience has helped explain the seriousness of Iwata’s situation and the seriousness of your own. Colon cancer is detectable via a colonoscopy, a simple exam that too many of us put off until its too late.