President Lou Anna K. Simon speaks during the student memorial tribute on April 21, 2017 behind the Student Services building. The memorial is held every year to commemorate the MSU students who lost their lives throughout the academic year. Fifteen students died this year.
An MSU student in the College of Osteopathic Medicine died April 9 after a four-month battle with colon cancer. Marcus Moses, 26, was a full-time medical student and was at the top of his class before his death.
Showing no signs of his illness, Moses was told he had stage four colon cancer on Christmas Eve. As a medical student, he knew he didn’t have much time left, but Moses saw his illness as an opportunity for activism.
He would help people become more aware of colon cancer. He would help change the system of how people are scanned for the illness.
He would make the time he had left worth it.
As written in his obituary, “He wanted to make a difference by raising awareness that colon cancer can happen in young people and may occur without symptoms.”
Moses’ cancer was on his right side, his mother Michele Moses said. According to the medical journal Clinical Advances in Hematology and Oncology, right-sided cancers tend to reflect symptoms only when the situation is relatively advanced, like in Marcus’s case. Right-sided colon cancers are usually diagnosed later than left-sided colon cancers.
Colon cancer is becoming more and more prevalent among young people. From 2000 to 2013, the rate of colon cancer in those younger than 50 has increased by 22 percent, as reported last month by the American Cancer Society.
Reasons for this increase are still unknown, but patterns such as an unhealthy diet or a sedentary lifestyle could be factors that might affect these rates.
"The sad thing about it is that colon cancer rates are on the rise in young people and it's not recommended to do screening until age 50,” Michele Moses said. “I’m hoping that they’ll change the screening age recommendation and that providers won’t be writing it off.”
Moses never had a drop of alcohol in his life, but died the way an alcoholic would, Michele Moses said. The colon cancer caused him to experience liver failure and kidney failure. He went blind, had fluid on his stomach, turned yellow and had to have a catheter.
"And this is a kid who never drank a drop of alcohol in his life,” she said. “He didn't drink pop, he didn't smoke, no drugs. He was really straight-laced and a good, good kid."
All Marcus ever wanted to do was to become a doctor and treat people, Michele Moses said. Determined, he was going to use what he and his family were going through to make a difference.
“It’s hard for me to talk about, but he was so adamant,” his mother, Michele Moses, said. “He said, ‘You know, mom, maybe this can help someone else.’ And that’s all the kid’s ever wanted to do.”
MSU Osteopathic Medicine student Emily Tibbitts knew Moses well. She was in his “pod,” the group of four medical students who worked closely throughout their first two years of medical school. She described Marcus as genuine and caring.
“He came to medical school already knowing how to care for the individual,” Tibbitts said.
Moses slept on the streets of Kalamazoo to raise awareness for the homeless. He volunteered in hospitals, assisted individuals who had mental and physical challenges and worked with crisis and fall risk patients.
"All he ever wanted to do was to be a doctor and to treat people. And even when he had, like, hallucinations, he walked by the La-Z-Boy chair — and we had to follow him because he was unsteady — he would take the chair, the armchair, and he'd poke at it saying, 'Does this hurt? Does this hurt?,’” Michele Moses said. “He'd say, 'She hurt her arm. I'm evaluating her arm.'"
When he discovered he had stage four cancer, he told his family he wanted to be buried in his white jacket if he didn’t make it.
“When Marcus told us on Christmas Eve he was diagnosed with cancer it was such a shock,” Tibbitts wrote in an email. “My pod wanted to do something to help him know he had the support at school. We thought it would be awesome to make a shirt that our class could wear to show Marcus we were thinking of him and we supported him.”
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Moses was involved in the Internal Medicine Club, Community Integrated Medicine and the Sigma Sigma Phi Honor Society. His colleagues in these groups helped him raise colon cancer awareness by selling t-shirts.
As treasurer for the class’s executive board, Eric Sandrock organized the t-shirt sales for Marcus. The sale ran from the end of February until mid-March, Sandrock said in an email. The shirts were completed in time to be worn by a team of osteopathic medicine students during MSU’s Relay for Life event.
Sandrock said he thinks selling the shirts did result in its intended impact — raising colon cancer awareness among young people.
“It also raised awareness in our smaller medical student community,” Sandrock said. “When we’ve learned about it, it’s always been kind of a disease of people who are middle aged or a little more advanced in age and not of someone who is 26 years old and one of our peers. So that, in a sense, kind of made people more aware that this could happen to anyone.”
Bringing awareness is exactly what Moses would want, his mother wrote in an email. And Michele Moses hopes to finish the movement he started.
“I want to get awareness out so other people don’t have to go through what we went through,” she said. “There’s things that need to change, you know? To make it better. Marcus would want it changed and he would do it in a good way.”
