MEL SCHILLING Cancer made me look at myself differently

One year on from going public with her bowel cancer diagnosis, Mel Schilling reveals where she's at with her health journey and how it's changed her irrevocably.

- TIFFANY DUNK

Walking into The Weekly's shoot back W in November, Mel Schilling admitted to feeling triggered. It was a year ago to the day, she revealed, that she was on this exact same street to see a doctor about the stomach pain she'd been suffering from in silence for weeks. She'd put it down to jet lag and overwork at first. But then the pain had become excruciating.

Yet instead of picking up on some obvious symptoms of what she would later learn was early-onset bowel cancer - including unexplained weight loss and an inability to go to the toilet - the doctor sent her away with a sachet of laxatives and the impression she was being dramatic.

"It was basically medical gaslighting, he completely minimised it," Mel says, adding that she'd discover, weeks later, she was in fact suffering a complete bowel blockage thanks to the existence of a tumour.

"I've been learning a lot about the gender pain gap and what I find interesting is that anything to do with our abdominal region, as women, it's straight away considered to be something hormonal. That you should just suck it up and get on with it, princess. When I made it clear it wasn't anything to do with periods, that it was definitely a digestive issue, then he said it was constipation." Leaving his office to return to the set of hit TV series Married at First Sight (MAFS), where she works as a relationships expert and was filming the final episodes of the season, Mel gritted her teeth and took some strong painkillers which hardly "touched the sides".

"I can barely even remember those two nights of filming," she admits.