Topics: Cancer, Colon cancer, Health
Warning: This article contains discussion of cancer which some readers may find distressing.
A woman diagnosed with cancer when she was 42 years old brushed off her symptoms because of one big factor.
Laura Behnke, who is now 46, was diagnosed with stage three colorectal cancer.
But it came months after she started showing symptoms, as she was preoccupied with another big medical event.
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Not only had this pulled focus, but it also provided another explanation for the symptoms that she had been experiencing.
Her diagnosis came in July 2022, when a scan and biopsy revealed the cancer after a colorectal surgeon she was sent to remove hemorrhoids realized something was wrong.
"It had broken through the rectal wall and was in some nearby lymph nodes," she told Today. "But thankfully, it was not metastatic and had not advanced to other organs."
This is because when she first began having symptoms, Laura was pregnant after undergoing IVF.
The San Francisco woman noticed that she was experiencing some bleeding when she went to the toilet, but chalked this up to a common condition in pregnancy - hemorrhoids.
She explained: "At this point, I was reading everything about being pregnant, and it's right around the second trimester they warn you that hemorrhoids start to come up."
The Cleveland Clinic explains that hemorrhoids are swollen blood vessels located either in the rectum or on the anus. These can cause bleeding when someone goes to the toilet, and are very common when someone is pregnant.
Laura reassured herself that this was what she was experiencing.
"I told myself, 'It's just hemorrhoids. Relax'," she said.
While speaking to her obstetrician, Laura brought up the bleeding, saying: "I didn't make it a big deal, she didn't ask questions ... I kind of self-diagnosed."
Her doctor agreed, but in the third trimester of her pregnancy, the condition worsened.
Laura noticed an external hemorrhoid which was painful and itchy, unlike the previous experiences she had.
Nonetheless, she still believed it was part of pregnancy, saying: "Still in my head, I wasn't connecting the dots that I had never felt that way before when I was bleeding."
When Laura gave birth to a healthy baby girl in December 2021, the bleeding stopped, seemingly confirming her theory.
"I was like, 'OK, that was it. Now this external hemorrhoid is going to fix itself'," she said. "Wishful thinking."
But then, the bleeding restarted, and her OBGYN said she would need the external hemorrhoid removed.
However, Laura put it off for six months and when she finally made the appointment, she said the surgeon knew 'almost immediately' that this was something else.
"It turns out that hemorrhoid bleeding tends to be more like droplets of blood," said Laura. "I was not having that, I was having bloody mucus."
A biopsy and imaging later revealed that she had Stage 3b colorectal cancer.
Fortunately, they were able to operate and Laura commenced a successful program of cancer treatment, and went into remission.
As is common practice, she still goes for regular checkups and was completely clear after her last scan in August 2025.
If you’ve been affected by any of these issues and want to speak to someone in confidence, contact the American Cancer Society on 1-800-227-2345 or via their live chat feature, available 24/7 every day of the year.
