‘Your whole world just stops’: surviving bowel cancer at 24

Australian Community Media

June is Bowel Cancer Awareness month, and survivors want Australians to know it's not just an 'old person's disease'. Hollie Owens shares her story of surviving bowel cancer after being diagnosed at 24.

Transcript

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 problem.

00:52 Took me over two years to get diagnosed

00:55 because bowel cancer was never something

00:56 that I guess anybody would assume

00:59 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]

01:25 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 for 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]

02:02 [music playing]

02:15 It's important, though, because we've

02:16 got rising rates of bowel cancer in people under the age of 50.

02:19 [music playing]

02:25 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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