On the long, ordinary list of things people blame on coffee, 'funny' bowels do not usually cause much alarm. You cut back on lattes, switch to oat milk, drink a bit more water and carry on. That was how James Van Der Beek — forever the earnest face of Dawson's Creek — first tried to explain away what his body was quietly telling him.

He was 47, fit, well-known for his clean-cut image and, by his own account, doing everything 'right.' Within a year, that nagging change in his bowel habits had led to a diagnosis of stage three colorectal cancer. This week, at 48, he died 'peacefully,' surrounded by his family. The detail that has stuck, and rightly so, is that he almost wrote it all off as a side effect of his morning brew.

Van Der Beek went public with his bowel cancer diagnosis in 2024, about a year after doctors first told him he had the disease. He had intended to share the news in a controlled way, through an awareness campaign with PEOPLE magazine. Instead, he was forced to speak out sooner than planned when another outlet found out and threatened to break the story. By that point, the cancer had already reached stage three.

In a disarmingly frank interview with PEOPLE in November 2024, he described how it began: not with dramatic bleeding or agony, but with subtle, persistent changes in the way he went to the toilet. No middle-of-the-night emergency dash. Just loo trips that felt off.

'I thought maybe I needed to stop coffee. Or maybe not put cream in the coffee,' he said. 'But when I cut that out and it didn't improve, I thought, "All right, I better get this checked out."'

He had no family history of bowel cancer. He was, as he put it, in 'amazing cardiovascular shape' and ate what he believed was a healthy diet. After finally agreeing to a colonoscopy, he woke up assuming he had ticked an unpleasant but necessary box.

'I felt really good coming out of anaesthesia, that I'd finally done it,' he recalled. 'Then the gastroenterologist said — in his most pleasant bedside manner — that it was cancer.'

The shock in his retelling is almost physical. 'I think I went into shock. I'd always associated cancer with age and with unhealthy, sedentary lifestyles. But I was in amazing cardiovascular shape. I tried to eat healthy – or as far as I knew it at the time.'

It is that last line that cuts through the celebrity gloss. It exposes a comforting fiction many of us cling to: that illness is something that happens mainly to other people, the ones who smoke too much, drink too much, move too little. Bowel cancer has been quietly dismantling that myth for years.

Since news of Van Der Beek's death, doctors have been repeating the same, stubborn message he tried to push while he was alive: bowel cancer often whispers before it screams. If those whispers are heard early enough, lives can be saved. Ignore them, and the odds get worse.

Source: International Business Times UK