00:00 Hearing those words, "You have cancer," it's very--
00:03 it's kind of like your whole world just stops.
00:06 And you just go into this emptiness.
00:10 It's a weird feeling.
00:11 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:15 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:43 Prior to my diagnosis, I presented to the GP
00:48 multiple times to just be told it was IBS or girl problems.
00:52 Took me over two years to get diagnosed,
00:55 because bowel cancer was never something
00:57 that I guess anybody would assume a 24-year-old would get.
01:01 Once you get through the cancer, it's like, who am I now?
01:05 Like, I've got this body that's got scars.
01:07 I've got these side effects.
01:09 I don't know who I am.
01:11 Everybody else's life is still going on.
01:13 Like, you feel lost.
01:14 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:18 And if I didn't advocate for myself,
01:27 I probably wouldn't be alive today.
01:29 And that's the thing is that--
01:31 I guess my big message to me is, like, you've
01:33 got to advocate for yourself.
01:35 Because if you don't speak up for yourself,
01:37 if you don't persist, nobody else is going to do it for you.
01:40 And if you feel like within yourself something's not right
01:43 and a doctor's not hearing you, you
01:45 need to keep pushing until somebody will listen to you.
01:48 You don't know what you can do until you're in or faced
01:52 an adversity like that.
01:53 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:56 [MUSIC PLAYING]
01:59 It's important, though, because we've
02:17 got rising rates of bowel cancer in people under the age of 50.
02:20 [MUSIC PLAYING]
02:24 [MUSIC PLAYING]
02:28 [MUSIC PLAYING]
02:31 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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