Bowel cancer survivor Matthew: I kept being told I couldn’t get it at just 25

FOR Matthew Jackson, being diagnosed with bowel cancer aged 25 led to him wrestling with the idea that he was somehow to blame.

‘I kept thinking, I’m too young for this – why me?’ he says. ‘I started to think it must have been my diet or something I’d done.’

The charity campaigns manager, now 26, from Cannock, Staffs, was diagnosed in July last year after experiencing extreme fatigue, anaemia and losing 30 per cent of his bodyweight. A GP ordered a FIT test which found significant blood in his stool, but a colonoscopy was initially rejected by the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust as Matthew was ‘too young’.

‘I kept being told it couldn’t be cancer because of my age,’ he says. ‘But when I got the colonoscopy, the mood in the room dropped very quickly. They found a large tumour, high up in my colon.’

Surgery to remove it was successful, and further tests on his lymph nodes revealed it had not spread, as doctors had feared. He was given the all-clear and has not needed chemotherapy.

Today, he is grateful for a ‘second chance’ at life and is planning to marry his fiancée, Charley, both pictured left.

‘I shouldn’t have had to go through this in my mid-20s, and Charley shouldn’t have had that worry that her partner might die,’ he says. ‘I’ve known lots of people in their 20s and 30s who’ve now had cancer and one very recently died aged 39. We need to find out why.’