Gut Feeling

Auckland business owner Anika Henderson was just 36 when she was diagnosed with bowel cancer. The mother-of-three says she would never have suspected her coeliac-like symptoms would turn out to be cancer. She shares her story to encourage other women to take charge of their health

I started having symptoms around September 2015. Initially my symptoms would swap between being constipated and having diarrhoea – it would be like that for a few days, and then I would be absolutely fine. Having three small kids, I thought maybe I just had a bug, or hadn’t been eating properly or regularly, or I was lacking sleep.

But it reached a point where I was running to the bathroom 10 times a day, and some blood would come out. That’s when it started to get a little more frightening and the doctors began to do more tests. But the problem with the flare-ups – and this is good for people to know – is I would be running to the toilet 10 times a day, but the very next day I was 100% fine, so I wouldn’t think about it.

What eventually prompted me to go to the doctor was when I started exercising again and I went to have a massage on the bands of my legs. When I got home I had to run to the toilet and blood just came out everywhere. I was tested for all sorts of gut issues: coeliac disease, Crohn’s disease, food intolerances, as well as being given a course of antibiotics. I had a colonoscopy and gastroscopy in September 2016, which is when they discovered the tumour. It was a year of symptoms before my diagnosis.

Two weeks later, I was having surgery. The surgeon was very straight up with me about the process. He said he would be removing a third of my bowel – they take as much as they can to get as many lymph nodes as they can, so they can see how far it has travelled. He explained that I would be in hospital for five days, and it would take a week to know if I needed chemo because it takes that long to get the test results back.