Fast action needed when that ‘funny tummy’ is cancer
In one turbulent year Sarah Lambourne was diagnosed with bowel cancer, had IVF treatment, five weeks of radiation, major surgery to remove cancerous tumours from her bowel, a hysterectomy and six months of chemotherapy.
The 41-year-old is acutely aware she dodged a bullet, surviving a deadly cancer on the rise for under-50s.
Lambourne is joining nine ‘‘young’’ Kiwis in the Never Too Young campaign, to raise awareness of bowel cancer among younger people. In New Zealand, 1200 people die each year from bowel cancer. An estimated 120 of those are under ther age of 50.
World-leading research published two years ago showed the disease had increased by 13 per cent among women and 18 per cent among men in the under 50 age group in the last 20 years.
Professor Frank Frizelle, the research head at Otago University in Christchurch, said it was an area that had been ‘‘ignored for too long’’.
Campaign organiser Chelsea Halliwell, who was diagnosed with stage three bowel cancer at 39, decided she needed to do something to stop more young people dying from the disease.
Lambourne said she had always had a ‘‘funny tummy’’ but put it down to a food intolerance.
It wasn’t until she noticed blood in her stools that she went to her GP.
She credits her GP’s swift referral for a colonoscopy and her private health insurance for catching a tumour the size of a small apple in her colon, before it spread and became terminal.
‘‘Anyone who has bleeding should go straight for a colonoscopy like I did.’’
Treatment included five weeks of radiation to shrink the tumour, surgery to remove it and 33 lymph nodes, and a hysterectomy because the tumour had stuck to Lambourne’s uterus.
She underwent a procedure to keep her ovaries safe during the radiation to protect her fertility and IVF with a sperm donor.
Through IVF, she now has two embryos ‘‘on ice’’.
Ministry of Health referral criteria says patients under 50 years with rectal bleeding will not be accepted for a colonoscopy but a GP can consider referring the patient for a specialist assessment or a procedure called a flexible sigmoidoscopy.
Medical director of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of GPs Dr Richard Medlicott said the ministry’s referral criteria for colonoscopies seemed outdated in the light of Frizelle’s research.