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At 36, Danielle Ripley-Burgess has already survived colon cancer twice. She was first diagnosed at 17 and then at 25. A member of the SurvivorNet Patient Community, a resource for people with cancer, in Kansas City, Missouri, Mom shared her story with TODAY and urged others to talk about their symptoms.
I had cancer that everyone thought older people had.
Towards the end of my 8th grade at the age of 14, I started seeing small spots of blood in my stool when I went to the bathroom. I didn’t know what was going on. I played it down and tried to convince myself that it was okay.
I thought, I’m eating something red and that’s probably what I’m seeing. So I went on a “no red food diet” and stopped eating anything that was red in color: everything from candy and pizza to salsa and raspberry popsicles.
It took a while for me to accept that I was actually seeing blood, but I still hid it from almost everyone I knew. I was already embarrassed by the puberty changes that were occurring, so on top of that it was just too much. I didn’t want to be sick and I didn’t feel sick at first.
But it pestered me, so about a year or two later, I mentioned something to my mom. We searched for it online and saw that it was probably hemorrhoids. She said the blood in the stool could also indicate something more serious, but it was something for people who were my grandparents’ age.
I was like, awesome, I have hemorrhoids and just got on with my life. In high school seeing blood in the stool became very normal, even though it got redder, darker, and more frightening. Eventually I had severe stomach pain and I was getting tired. I couldn’t play volleyball anymore. I just wanted to come home and sleep.
When I was 16, I told my boyfriend that I thought I needed to see a doctor, but I didn’t tell him the details. My mom overheard one of our conversations and realized that I was still seeing blood. She told my dad and they called the doctor, who immediately sent me to a gastroenterologist.
Just a few weeks after turning 17, I was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. I had chemotherapy, radiation therapy and surgery to remove the tumor. I also had surgery to move my ovaries into my stomach to protect them from radiation. The doctors wanted to save the ovaries to save hormonal function, but by raising them, I could no longer conceive naturally.
I thought I beat cancer. I had colonoscopies every three years and after one of them I woke up and saw the same look on the doctor’s face that I had seen eight years before. He saw a polyp which later turned out to be cancerous. I had no symptoms. When I was 25, I had stage 1 colon cancer.
Mentally and emotionally, it was much more difficult this time. I got really mad at a lot of things, but deep inside just mad at God – how could you let this happen to me again? At this point I was married, had a house, was working on a quarry, we were talking about adopting a child. Suddenly I realized that I could lose all of these things.
When you have a second cancer like me, you have to accept that your life will always contain cancer.
Right now I’m not an active cancer patient, but I don’t know a world without cancer, and that’s something I had to come to terms with when my second occurrence happened.
I have no family history and there was no explanation at the start. I now know I have Lynch Syndrome, a genetic condition that puts you at higher risk for multiple cancers, with colon and rectal cancers at the top of this list. I am the first in my family to have the transfer.
I had a subtotal colectomy, which basically takes your entire colon except about 13 inches. If you run out of colon, your risk goes down.
Knowing that the next target for Lynch syndrome was going to be either uterine cancer or ovarian cancer, I also had a hysterectomy to prevent that. Part of my cancer story is a story of infertility. Adopting our daughter has become our way to start a family.
My monitoring should include annual colonoscopies, and I do laboratory and urine tests every year.
If I could go back and say something to my young self, it would be: don’t be embarrassed by your body.
More and more young people like me are getting colon cancer. Chadwick Boseman has brought this problem to the fore all over the world, but I have lived there for 20 years.
If you see something with your body that is uncomfortable and strange, and you are not yet ready to tell a doctor about it, tell someone – a friend or family member. Don’t sit there: something is wrong with your body and you don’t know what it is. Don’t sit alone. Don’t minimize what you see.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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