When Rebecca Redshaw 35 visited India and stayed there for six months recently, it seemed she picked up an unwanted souvenir. Like many Western travelers plagued by stomach troubles, she too experienced stomach problems and it showed no signs of dissipating. It seemed Rebecca had a bug. Her GP diagnosed it to be Giardia, a common infection and prescribed a dose of antibiotics.
Although the symptoms reduced but she started experiencing severe abdominal pain after which she paid her doctor another visit. Her doctor instead attributed her problem to the after effects of IBS.
1 Her stomach ailment turned out to be something shocking
When Rebecca who hails from West London sought a second opinion she got the shock of her life. What her GP thought was IBS turned out to be ovarian cancer instead. According to Professor Sean Kehoe, Chief medical adviser for the charity Ovacome, ““It’s a challenge for family doctors to pick up that the symptoms could signal ovarian cancer, and they will want to rule out less sinister possibilities first.” He also stated that it wasn’t uncommon for women to be mistake symptoms of ovarian cancer for something else.
More than 7,200 women annually are diagnosed in the UK with ovarian cancer which is the 5th most common cancer that attacks women. However if detected early, women have a 90% survival rate of more than 5 years. Unfortunately for Rebecca, it was too late. A camera operator for the BBC, she had first consulted her GP in 2012. By the year end, she was constantly suffering from constipation to the point of it affecting her work.
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