News and Events |
"COCO THE 'COLOSSAL COLON' COMES TO CINCINNATI!!!"
Crawl Space
You can take a trip where the sun doesn't shine!
BY LORI KURTZMAN | LKURTZMAN@ENQUIRER.COM
Word that a gigantic body organ was traveling to town came weeks ago.
|
|
"COCO THE 'COLOSSAL COLON' COMES TO
CINCINNATI!" screamed a press release. Coco the what?
"It stands 4 feet tall and is 40 feet long," the e-mail read. "It has rubbed shoulders with CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric, educated hundreds of thousands across America, and is personally inviting you to crawl through its hallowed halls to learn more about colorectal cancer."
A personal invite from a 40-foot, Katie-Couric-touched colon? Who could resist?
On Thursday morning, Coco is curled in the corner of a room inside the TriHealth Fitness & Health Pavilion on Pfeiffer Road, where the colon will be open to the public through Sunday. It looks a bit like a big worm. A hollow, peach-colored coil.
A woman crouches and passes through and pops out of one of the windows on the colon, waving.
Cute.
But inside, Coco is loaded with Crohn's disease, hemorrhoids and cancerous and noncancerous polyps. Not so cute. |
Elena Wolf of Symme Township goes on an insider's tour Thursday of "Coco the Colossal Colon." it is a replica of the human colon and is in Montgomery through Sunday to draw attention to colorectal health.
The Enquirer/Gary Landers
|
|
|
"I think it's something that only children could appreciate with their sense of humor," says former Enquirer art critic - and colon cancer survivor - Owen Findsen.He looks at it from across the room. "It's silly. It's almost absurd."
Almost. But the purpose behind Coco is one Findsen knows well: raising the awareness of colon diseases and colorectal cancer, the third most common cancer in the United States, which caused about 52,180 deaths in 2007.
Findsen, who said he finally got a colonoscopy in 2002, after Couric did it for a television audience, chats about cancer to anyone who will listen. He volunteers to drive a person to his colonoscopy, and back, and out for lunch in-between. When their 38-year-old son asked Findsen and his wife, Judy, what they wanted for Christmas, they told him to get a colonoscopy.
Findsen was 9 years old when his father died of colon cancer. Now he's 72 and cancer-free.
"It's just such a thing to be able to encourage people to have that test," he says.
Back to this big colon. Coco exists because Molly McMaster and Hannah Voglerbuilt it to honor Amanda Sherwood Roberts, 27, of Little Rock, Ark., who died of colon cancer five years ago.
The women wanted to spread the word that anyone can get colorectal cancer. They founded an organization in New York called the Colon Club, which takes a nontraditional approach to colorectal education: The club sells toilet paper that reads "Wipe out colorectal cancer" and calendars of cancer survivors proudly displaying their scars. They run events called Cut the Cheese to Cut Out Colorectal Cancer and, of course, they send Coco on the road.
Which is how Coco got here.
Deb Riggs, 53, the center's general manager, eyes the tube. She knows it can take extreme measures to get people to pay attention to their colons, so she is liking this big, crazy, crawl-through display.
"You've gotta make fun of things like this in order to draw attention," she says.
|
