Your health should never be taken for granted and sometime what you may feel are minor symptoms can turn out to be more serious cases of disease. One married woman 33 learned the hard way when she thought her symptoms of indigestion and stomach ailments for two years was only due to stress and her food truck diet. Instead, it turned out to be stage 4 colon cancer.
Colon and rectal cancers are on the rise and Diana Zepeda is among the rising number of young men and women being diagnosed with the disease. Almost 85% of people with colorectal cancer end up being misdiagnosed with symptoms of other diseases.
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Diana Zepeda 33 lives in Washington DC and works long hours as who works as a finance professional. Since she never had time to eat, she would tuck in anything available from stalls and food trucks in her spare time. Soon she started feeling the consequences of her unhealthy lifestyle.
Even her friends started developing intolerances over food and because of her work stress and lifestyle; Zepeda’s stomach soon started giving problems which was inevitable. Within six months, Zepeda was to undergo the worst trauma of her life ending up with half her digestive system removed, radiation and sessions of chemotherapy.
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Zepeda works for the Interstate Hotels and is a bright cheery woman with a slim lean physique but today she has a scar from chemo ports on her chest. Zepeda even exercised a few times a week and was an active woman who considered herself healthy in a general sense. She didn’t expect anything wrong with her body.
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Zepeda is among an alarming rate of young people who are lowly developing such dangerous diseases assumed to be conditions that only affect the aged. It all started with infrequent bouts of diarrhea which she suffered for two years. She casually blamed it on her diet.
Zepeda’s job required her to maintain long hours of work and thus lunch was a grab and eats from whatever source she could get which invariably turned out to be food stalls, food trucks and fat food joints. Her dinner also happened to be takeouts almost every day.
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Along with her unhealthy eating, her diarrhea plagued her incessantly and started to get more frequent. She soon needed to take off from work which kept stressing her out.
“I figured I'm not in my 20s anymore, I can't just eat whatever I want without consequences and this is my new normal,' she said.
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In February 2017, Zepeda starting passing blood in her stool which worried her. He Googled her symptoms and found that diarrhea was common to many things including ulcers, hemorrhoids, or an allergy. Cancer was not the least on her mind.
Once her holidays were over, she started cutting out items from her diet which she suspected could be the cause of her problems. She stopped sugar and dairy as well as grains. However, her symptoms only got worse.
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Just like every other millennial, Zepeda avoided consulting the doctor unless necessary and neither did she know a primary care physician. He felt bathroom issues to be embarrassing and did not went to risk going for GI tests as the very thought mortified her.
Ultimately she confronted her fears and visited a female gastroenterologist Doctor Jessica Korman who was recommended to her. Doctor Korman has a two-month waitlist for patients and so Zepeda booked one and waited till it was her time.
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Zepeda’s tests confirmed what the doctor had suspected, an E-coli infection which could be easily treated with antibiotics. Korman reassured her she would be okay in five days but the treatment started making her sick and the doctor finally asked her to get a colonoscopy done.
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When you do not have a family history of colorectal cancer, it is advisable to get a colonoscopy done after you hit 50 and if someone in the family does have it, then it should be done before aged 60. The American Cancer Society advises people to get this unpleasant test done earlier. Zepeda prepared herself for one even though there was no family history of colorectal cancer.
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Zepeda revealed 'I was scared, I was embarrassed, and I was dreading it. I didn't know what to expect because that's not on my radar at this age, so it sounded a bit overboard,’ She drank 64 ounces of a liquid that was meant to purge everything out of her GI system. She recalls how the laxative did not have any effect even though her body reacted strongly to it with intense abdominal pain and vomiting.
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Zepeda’s husband Alexander Sweeny rushed her to emergency where she was put on painkillers and medication. Although the doctors learnt she was scheduled for a colonoscopy, they didn’t want to perform any scans on her because she was of reproductive age. The doctors were concerned that a CT scan could make her infertile and that the odds of her suffering a GI problem were too low to risk the scan and damage her reproductive health.
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However the next day, Zepeda was asked to return for a partial colonoscopy and that was when doctors found a golf ball sized tumor which was the reason for her GI tract blockage and which also stopped the laxative from working earlier. Zepeda was then diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer and now considers herself extremely lucky to have gone and done the colonoscopy or else the doctor would have just written off her symptoms to IBS.
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Zepeda asked her oncologist how she could have contracted cancer. The most disturbing trend of colorectal cancer in young people is that they may seem otherwise healthy and active with good diet but it is ultimately diet and environmental factors that are causing a rise in the disease. It could also be the result of changing hygiene practices throwing people’s microbiomes out of order.
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Zepeda was treated with radiation to shrink the tumor before surgery. When she finally went for surgery, doctors removed almost one and a half foot of her colon, gall bladder, appendix and lymph nodes. Even 75 percent of her liver was removed. They even harvested her eggs for future use in case she required it.
At the end of her six-month ordeal, that required chemo for the entire six month, and the major invasive surgery, she feels she saved her own life by going in the nick of time. At the end of her treatment, Zepeda who kept herself away from family and friends because of her chemo.
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She is due for a second surgery to reverse the ileostomy that surrounds her small intestine and will then have scan every three months for two years to check if the tumor grows back again but she is optimistic. She wore a black gown for her last chemo session.
Zepeda has also learned one big lesson that there is no substitute for medical advice and taking symptoms seriously by seeking a diagnosis and treatment. Google doesn’t always give you the answer.
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