A woman in her twenties has revealed that she missed the early signs of cancer until it was diagnosed five months later.
Jody Horne, now 34, from Melbourne, was diagnosed with bowel cancer just two weeks before her 29th birthday.
Up until that point, she was happy and healthy, living an enjoyable life Down Under.
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She recognised that she had been feeling overly tired, and experienced some blood in her stools as well as discomfort, but put it to the back of her mind, not considering that it could have been a sign of something more serious.
Her symptoms hadn’t been too severe, until she suffered a five-hour rectal bleed five months later.
This prompted her to visit an out-of-hours clinic where a doctor told her to ‘go to Emergency if the bleeding didn’t stop soon, and if it did, to see a gastroenterologist’.
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While the bleeding eventually stopped, Jody made an appointment to see a gastroenterologist who performed a sigmoidoscopy a couple of weeks later.
A sigmoidoscopy can screen for rectal cancers, and on Jody's scan it detected a polyp.
Jody was asked to have a colonoscopy to have the polyp removed, but this is when medics discovered a tumour.
After a biopsy confirmed the tumour was cancerous, Jody was diagnosed with Stage 2 rectal cancer.
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Speaking to 7Life, she said: “I was young and enjoying life and then the carpet pulled out from underneath me.
"I felt shocked and numb.
“It was an incredibly upsetting experience."
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After receiving the heartbreaking news, she found herself delivering it on the phone to her loved-ones.
Jody described it as ‘the most awful’ thing to have to ring her parents, family, and friend to tell them about her diagnosis.
As part of her treatment for the cancer, she also underwent a 'life-saving' temporary ileostomy during two major surgeries, as well as treatments such as fertility preservation to freeze her eggs for future plans to have children.
Jody added: “Having a family will look very different now (surrogacy or adoption) from how I might have imagined it to look.”
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Thankfully the treatment was successful and Jody is now cancer-free. However, she is now urging for others to look out for earlier symptoms.
She stressed: “There’s no taboo about poo, it’s just an aspect of our health; we need to talk more about it and we need to break down the stigma.
“Blood is never normal in your stool. If it’s a lot or a little it’s always worth investigating.”
The NHS has advice of what to do if you experience symptoms of bowel cancer here.
Mia Williams