'Doctors thought my hectic lifestyle was making me ill until everything changed'

Natasha de Teran was rushed to hospital in excruciating pain — but that was just the start of her health nightmare, as Joanne Ridout reports

- Joanne Ridout reports

WHEN financial services, technology and policy expert Natasha de Teran started fainting at the age of 51 in 2020, it was attributed to her hectic lifestyle of travelling to Europe frequently for work combined with the menopause.

Natasha, originally from Italy but now living in Monmouthshire, recalled: “I just thought, well, you know, do some yoga and maybe just not work so much - less flying and less stress of work - and maybe that would improve things. I suppose I felt better for a while but I was still very tired.

“And we had just bought a house and I had a young teenage daughter, so it seemed a good time to take a break and try and sort out whatever was wrong with me.

“So I had some tests, but we were now into Covid times in 2021 when a cancer burst through my bowel wall.

“I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew I was in extraordinary pain. So my husband - we left our daughter with a neighbour - rushed me to hospital. They operated pretty immediately, and I woke up with a stoma, but I still didn’t know it was cancer.”

After chasing for the pathology from the operation due to her very worried and insistent sister, Natasha had a call from her GP, who told her that it was definitely stage four bowel cancer.

Natasha says: “That was brutal. It was very difficult, it took quite a while to get through the testing process, the scans and so forth to identify spreads, and to rule out liver and lung. So that was a very traumatic several months and, you know, I wasn’t physically well too, obviously.

“My stomach had been cut away in two places, so I had no stomach muscles. So just walking was pretty difficult. And of course, it was lockdown, so there weren't the sort of usual things of life going on either.

“My husband works from home so that was lovely and we live in a really friendly Welsh village and so many people were incredibly supportive, and friends. But it was lockdown, so that was quite tricky.”