In early October 2014, I woke up from a colonoscopy to a concerned looking gastroenterologist. She started asking me about any family history of cancer and from that moment on I knew the cause of my bowel problems were larger than I thought. I think back to that day… five years on… and I see it now as the day that saved my life.

One of the first blog posts I wrote was about my incredibly frustrating and long journey to be diagnosed with Familial Adenomatous Polyposis (FAP). It took over five years of explaining my embarrassing symptoms to multiple GPs with little response, so much so I had given up trying to find an answer.

I can’t imagine where I’d be today if I hadn’t tried one final time to be listened to.

The thing with FAP is that it causes hundreds of polyps to carpet your large bowel – by the time I was diagnosed there were many that were at a stage of high grade dysplasia (next step… cancerous). I was able to take a year to prepare physically and mentally for surgery and do other precautionary things that may be impacted by surgery which I’m incredibly grateful for. But in the terms of polyps turning to cancer it really is scary to think that I could have easily gone on for another year or two without a diagnosis and intervention.

Being treated in time has been so important because on top of polyps in the bowel, FAP also causes me to have lots of polyps throughout very tricky areas of my GI tract (duodenum, stomach and ampulla, next to the pancreas). Whilst unlike bowel polyps that will 100% turn cancerous in people with FAP, these ones still have a pretty high chance and come in large numbers (who doesn’t love a polyp party!)

So at the time of diagnosis this meant that alongside meeting my surgeon for the first time, I was also back in day surgery for a gastroscopy to see what was happening in those other places. Thankfully at the time of diagnosis there were polyps, but they were all the smallest they could possibly be.

I didn’t have to play catch up

Instead, I’ve been able to have yearly monitoring and as required I have the larger polyps in these areas removed. It’s not easy on the mind to live with pre-cancerous growths inside of you, but I take comfort that I’m taking preventative action and my timely diagnosis meant this was possible for me.

Five years has been a long time and it’s given me time to reflect on what I went through to get diagnosed. In my first blog I wrote about one of the many GPs I saw who dismissed my fears and sent me on my way due to my age. His words made me feel like I was overplaying my symptoms and were what stopped me looking for an answer for the next two years. Am I still angry about how I was treated? Yes. But I have managed to process it all a little more and see that this is a bigger problem than this one GP. I’ve connected with more people on social media around the world, and been involved with Bowel Cancer Australia’s Never Too Young campaign and there are sadly too many diagnosis stories like mine.

Through understanding that there needs to be more awareness about bowel cancer in younger patients, I’ve directed my anger and frustrations towards that, in the hope of making it an easier diagnosis path for people in the future.