Mother diagnosed with colon cancer at 25

A mother was told that she had a stomach bug but a scary episode of vomiting of a “cigarette tar -like substance led to a diagnosis of cancer, sepsis and emergency operations.

Chloe Wakelin was 25 when she started experiencing stomach flu-like symptoms as a daycare center in 2023 and the mother of a 6-year-old assumed that she had picked up a bug from one of the children.

When the symptoms – a bloated feeling, nausea, fatigue – kept her doctor. After the tests for Crohn’s disease and the irritable intestinal syndrome came back negatively, her doctor said it was indeed a belly bug, Wakelin said via Kennedy News and Media via The daily mail.

Wakelin, from the English town of Rochdale, says that her symptoms were easy to fire because “I didn’t have the” typical “symptoms for colon cancer”, the Mayo clinic says it includes a bloody stool and weight loss.

Her condition deteriorated in December 2023, when she left something that she described as ‘as a cigarette tar’. She visited the hospital, but says she had not given tests until she returned a month later – this time, when her skin ‘turned yellow’.

Main – yellow from the skin and eyes – is a visible sign that something is wrong with the liver, so Wakelin says she finally got a scan. That is the moment when doctors discovered a tumor in her colon and realized that she had already developed sepsis, a life -threatening state that occurs when the body reacts incorrectly to an infection.

She was told that she had to have part of her intestine removed immediately.

“I was told that if I didn’t have the operation, I would have had 12 hours to live because my kidney and my liver failed,” she said. Doctors removed 25 cm from her gut, together with her lymph nodes, because of the spread of the cancer. She was equipped with a stoma in her belly, which offers an external way for waste to leave the body where it is collected in an ostomy bag.

“Waking up in recovery, I remember feeling my stomach. It just felt like everything around me had crumbled, “Wakelin told the exhaust valve.

“You always think that you are too young at the age of 25, because it is usually a cancer that affects older people,” says Wakelin, adding that she shares her story to increase the consciousness of colon cancer among young people.

The diagnoses of colon cancer and deaths due to the disease – have steadily increased in people younger than 50, the American Cancer Society said.

“I just want to remember everyone not to be ashamed of their doctor about any symptoms they might have, regardless of your age,” Wakelin said. “It can meet everyone.”

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