I was diagnosed with colorectal cancer a week before Christmas 2018.

I'm a mum to two beautiful daughters aged 18 and 10.

I finally found a GP (GP #6) who wasn't dismissive of my symptoms (I very rarely visited a doctor!) and after an eight month wait on the colonoscopy wait list, cancer still wasn't exactly something I had thought twice about because...I'm still too young, right?!?!

Wrong.

By mid-January 2019 I was given a stoma. Imagine that. Two weeks after your 39th birthday, waking up with a colostomy...because I was too young for bowel cancer, that five out of six doctors dismissed me, to the extent the tumour was that big.

Early February I underwent 25 rounds of radiation and chemotherapy treatment.

Early May I had the surgery that saved my life.

I'm still recovering but recovering well.

I start another six months of chemotherapy in a couple of weeks.

My life is forever changed.

My daughter's lives are forever changed.

If the first GP had listened my life would be very different.

I feel lucky that my current GP is tenacious and listens! There are many men and women who weren't so lucky and it's for them that we, as a community, need to do whatever we can to shift the focus off of cancer discriminating against age.

Never too young!!