Healthly mom, 40, fighting for her life after suddenly diagnosed with Stage 4 bowel cancer

A 40-year-old mom is fighting for her life after she went to bed one night and “woke up with Stage 4 bowel cancer.”Helen Worthington, a primary school teacher from Adelaide, had no idea what awaited her when she suddenly felt an “uncomfortable” twinge in her abdomen in the early hours of August 27 last year.“Nothing really made sense,” she told news.com.au.“I initially thought I may be coming down with gastro.”Also struggling with a sharp pain higher in her stomach, Worthington decided to seek help later in the morning and visited a nearby emergency department after she was unable to book an appointment with her GP.Fearing that she was making a mountain out of a molehill, the mom even apologized to physicians for using the hospital’s valuable resources.“I didn’t want to make a fuss or waste anyone’s time,” she said.

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“I’m rarely unwell, so I thought it was probably nothing serious and that I’d be told I was absolutely fine.I certainly didn’t expect what followed.”Fortunately, doctors did take Worthington seriously from the moment she arrived.“Although they initially thought there could be a very simple explanation for my pain, they made us feel that we had done the right thing by coming in and getting it investigated,” the teacher said.“Things escalated very quickly.

I went from thinking I had gastritis to being told I had stage four bowel cancer.There was no gradual realization that something might be wrong.

It was a complete shock.”In the days that followed, the teacher struggled to believe that she not only had cancer, but that it had already spread to her liver.Until those painful early morning hours, she hadn’t suffered any symptoms.“I spent a long time trying to work out how ...