I found out I had colon cancer after a scary surprise at the gym

Personal trainer Bill Maeda, 56, has always been pretty high energy. 

He was only 7 or 8 years old when he first started working out, inspired by the speed and athleticism of Bruce Lee — and his muscles.

“I had never seen muscles,” he said. “I was blown away by that. He just looks so deadly.” 

And it was while doing his job — training at the gym — in 2012 that he realized something was seriously wrong, sending him to the hospital to discover he had Stage 3 colon cancer. 

Maeda was working on some martial arts moves with a client, who kept practicing his kicks against a pad Maeda had over his stomach. 

When he went to the bathroom, there was blood — a lot of blood. 

“Apparently, when he kicked me, the cancerous lesion that I had tore,” he said. 

He went to the ER, where he was put into immediate surgery. 

“Knowing what I know now, I would have gone in way sooner than I did,” he said. 

It’s not that Maeda didn’t have symptoms before — they were just easy to brush off as something else.

Living in Los Angeles and working as a trainer in gyms and on movie sets, he appeared to be the picture of good health.

When he started to have “weird bowel movements” in his 40s, he attributed the change to his eating choices. 

“My diet was so god awful back then,” he said. 

“I was eating like two pints of ice cream. And probably my diet had a lot to do with [the cancer]. But I just thought that my system was becoming intolerant of my already really bad diet. Because, back then, I was eating boxes of macadamia chocolate. I mean, it was bad.”

Surprised? According to Maeda, it’s actually not all that uncommon in the world of personal trainers. 

“You should see the behind-the-scenes on us,” he said. 

“We’re like serial killers, where you think we’re just normal and we’re real and then we go home and we have this altered life. When I think of the amount of sugar and garbage that I was eating — it was a mental illness. It was a full-on disorder.”

His only other real symptom was a pain that developed in his solar plexus, which would sometimes get so bad he’d have to double over — a move he would try to hide by pretending he was just examining his clients’ foot positions. 

“When I would go into that position, the pain would dissipate,” he said. “And it never occurred to me, well, after that happens a few hundred times, maybe you should go to a doctor. No, I kept just denying it.”

He also figured he wasn’t really much of a candidate for cancer since it didn’t run in his family, although he admits he was a “troubled soul” in high school who smoked cigarettes and “experimented pretty heavily” with methamphetamines. 

But he still believes the “biggest mistake” he made was routinely neglecting sleep. 

“I had trained myself in high school to operate on small amounts of sleep because I thought that’s what it required to be a special forces guy,” he said. 

“If you’re a real tough guy, you can get by on less sleep than everybody else, eating less food, bad food, etc.”

When he got his cancer diagnosis, he admits he never worried about death: “I took it one day at a time and always assumed things would be alright,” he said.

His assumption turned out to be right: He’s been cancer-free for 13 years now and he feels better than ever. 

For one thing, getting cancer made him clean up his diet and prioritize rest. He also trains less often and less hard than he used to.