TV footy reporter Mark Stevens has revealed his bowel cancer diagnosis to help others

TV journalist Mark Stevens never thought he would hear a doctor say the C word. Now he wants to share his story as a warning.

TV footy reporter Mark Stevens has revealed his shock bowel cancer diagnosis in the hope of giving others a wake-up call to get checked.

Channel 7’s chief footballer reporter experienced symptoms in Queensland last year while in the AFL hub.

“As guys do, you put things off, you think if you go and get checked you might actually find out too much,’’ Stevens, 51, said.

“Eventually I went to the doctor and explained my symptoms and he said ‘book in for a colonoscopy’ and then they found a polyp.

Mark Stevens says he hopes his diagnosis can serve as a wake-up call to others.

“I found out about a week later that it was cancerous and the cancer had spread into the wall of the colon.

“About 10 minutes before I went to air one night I got the call from the colonoscopy guru and he said ‘it’s probably not the news you want to hear, you may need an operation to take out that piece because it’s spread’.

“I did the cross, headed home, and started thinking about what I had to do next.”

The father of two had surgery to remove the affected area in late March and after being told it was stage one, avoided further treatment.

He had a clean history of health and would have left it longer had two friends not also gone through bowel cancer.

Those friends, also in the media — Adam Hamilton and Mark Allen — have recovered well.

“Effectively the message is get yourself checked because if I had left it, it could have obviously been a lot worse,’’ Stevens said.

“And part of the message is that I know Mark and Adam, and we’re all about the same age when this happened. I look at them and they’re bulletproof, they got it worse than me. Luckily I got it early.”

Stevens and wife Jane sat down with Peter Mitchell to tell his story on Seven’s Mitch’s Melbourne on Sunday night.