Mom diagnosed with bowel cancer denied surgery after struggling to use toilet for two weeks

A woman who was diagnosed with bowel cancer after struggling to go to the toilet for two weeks has been denied surgery.Vicky Mcloughlin, 66, was diagnosed with stage three bowel cancer in November 2024.Her daughter, Chloe, 33, started noticing that Vicky “wasn’t herself” and she later found out she’d been struggling to go to the toilet for two weeks.When she started suffering from bleeding, Vicky had an endoscopy that didn’t initially pick up on anything.Chloe took her mom to A&E, where they scanned her and felt a mass in her cervical area.A biopsy confirmed it was cancer, and they were told the tumor had started in her bowels and progressed to her cervical area.To complicate matters further, when the tumor spread, it created a hole in her bowel and cervical area – meaning she needed a stoma bag and a tube inserted in her kidneys to drain urine.This also resulted in regular infections and a build-up of fluid that needed to be drained.Morning Report delivers the latest news, videos, photos and more.

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Never miss a story.Because of this, Vicky was denied chemotherapy due to infections and had two lots of radiotherapy instead.Chloe pleaded with doctors at Solihull Hospital and St Mark’s Hospital in London to operate and remove the tumor, but both refused, saying the operation came with too much risk, could result in Vicky losing her leg and leave her with a worse quality of life.In a letter sent to Vicky, doctors said they had “significant concerns” about how she would cope with the surgery.It went on to say that the “combination of her overall fitness and the magnitude of the disease with the likelihood of a positive resection margin means that we think progressing to an attempted major pelvic resection would not be in her best interests.”But Vicky’s family disagree with the decision, sayi...