Britt Jones
A woman was diagnosed with an incurable cancer after feeling too embarrassed about her symptoms to seek advice.
Jenny Duncan first began noticing her symptoms when she was on vacation in Lanzarote in 2019, but quickly dismissed it.
As a 45-year-old who was fit and healthy, she didn’t think it could be a sign of anything serious and even believed it could be piles.
However, she would find out the full extent of her disease in 2020, before eventually being given the heartbreaking news her condition is incurable.
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Jenny, who hails from Hull in the UK, was just about to begin her new job as an assistant head teacher at a school, so when her stomach started to hurt and blood would appear on her toilet paper, she put it down to ‘stress’ and minor ailments.
She was a busy woman, and the timing of her symptoms were not right, so she put them off.
But when her husband caught wind of what she was going through, he promptly told her to see medical advice.
This is when she found out she had stage 3 bowel cancer.
“I was only 45, and I thought bowel cancer was something that only happened to older men,” she said of that time.
Having experienced excessive bloating and wind after meals, she thought it was her workload manifesting as physical symptoms of stress.
“I was very tired, but I thought that was just due to the pressures of work,” Jenny added. “I used to come home late and get straight back to work.”
As she was ‘not really one to visit the doctor’, she admitted she ‘just chose to ignore it’.
Admitting she was ‘probably a bit embarrassed too’ because the subject matter was about ‘poo and bums’, she hoped the symptoms would disappear.
However, they worsened.
When the mom-of-three kept seeing blood when she used the toilet, she began to take pictures to track it, leading to her husband accidentally seeing an image while they lay in bed together in October.
“He said: ‘What on Earth? We need to get you some help’. And because he is normally so calm and measured, I knew I had to do something,” she shared.
At this point, Jenny was going to the toilet five times a day, which was accompanied by blood.
After booking an appointment to see a doctor, they initially told her she was probably too young to have bowel cancer, but when she showed them the images of her fecal matter, she was referred to a specialist.
That same month Jenny was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer.
She went on to express how she wished she had visited the doctor sooner, and hadn’t been put off by the embarrassing symptoms.
She said: “I do regret not going to the doctor straight away. I could kick myself for letting it go on so long. But I didn’t know that bowel cancer could affect someone in their forties.
"If I’d have known my poo and looked back and not been embarrassed and paid more attention to my body, would I then have got help sooner and would I be in this position now? I don’t know."
Jenny began her chemotherapy as Covid-19 was on the horizon in the UK, and she was left isolated and suffering from rashes and hair loss during her treatment.
In March, her tumor was removed and felt this ‘black, dark feeling’ around her as Covid forced her to be alone.
While the surgery was a success, Jenny was told her cancer had spread to her lymph nodes in January 2022, making it incurable.
“I absolutely lost it. I was crying and I kept telling Stuart ‘I’m going to die, I’m going to die’. I withdrew for a few days, didn’t want to see anybody,” said Jenny.
But after that time spent alone, she decided to live her life and threw herself back into work and spending time with her adult sons, Joseph, 26 and twins Matthew and James, 24.
Jenny now lives with incurable stage four bowel cancer, and because she doesn’t react well to chemotherapy, she has scans every three to six months.
Her treatment will begin again when her quality of life deteriorates.
“It’s been three years since my operation and I’ve been very lucky. I socialise, I work. I do get tired, but I certainly have a life. I am just grateful for every day, as tomorrow isn’t promised to any of us,” said Jenny.
According to the Mayo Clinic, symptoms of bowel cancer include a change in bowel habits, rectal bleeding or blood in the stool, ongoing discomfort in the belly area, such as cramps, gas or pain, feeling that the bowel doesn't empty all the way during a bowel movement, weakness or tiredness, and losing weight without trying.