Teaching assistant diagnosed with bowel cancer at 22 reveals three symptoms people of all ages should know
A 24-year-old teaching assistant proudly teamed her summer festival outfit of a blue bikini and furry coat with a walking stick twinkling with fairy lights and two stoma bags as she celebrated surviving stage three bowel cancer.
Diagnosed aged just 22, Sophie Anderson is now in remission and, inspired by bowel cancer campaigner Dame Deborah James, is determined to raise awareness of the disease – particularly in young people.
Sudden weight loss, passing blood and incontinence led to her initial diagnosis and treatment just after her 22nd birthday, only for the disease to return with a vengeance in October 2020 when a “football-sized” tumour was found on her bowel and harrowing life-saving surgery followed.
Refusing to be beaten, Sophie, of Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, who has enjoyed fantastic support from her police officer boyfriend Alex, 24, is now making the most of life, saying: “So much happened to me, I shouldn’t even be here, but I am.”
She said: “I went to the Secret Garden Party festival in Huntingdon in July with my friends and we all got dressed up.
“I had put on more weight and felt more confident and wore a blue bikini and a fur coat and wrapped my walking stick in fairy lights.
“I felt really good. I had such a good time and laughed more than I had in years.”
Sophie first experienced health problems in 2016, aged 18, after starting a university course in operating department practice.
She said: “One day I needed to go to the toilet and passed a lot of blood.”
“It was weird, but it didn’t happen again for a while, so I thought maybe it was just a one off.
“Then I started to feel really weighed down, constantly bloated and fatigued.”
Putting her exhaustion down to stress, her mood soon dropped.
She said: “I was quite depressed because my body felt so weak and I couldn’t pinpoint why.”
Signed off from university at Easter 2017, as her mental health became increasingly fragile she moved back home, where she now lives with her mum, Elizabeth Anderson, 53, and sibling, Ash Anderson, 22, both teaching assistants, and saw her GP, who diagnosed depression and anxiety.
In July 2017, by then working as a carer, she began passing blood more often, saying: “Sometimes I would go for a week without anything,. Then there’d be lots and I was getting more constipated.”
I became very scared of the idea of dying in my sleep.
Seeing different doctors over the coming months, she was diagnosed with digestive disorders including IBS, Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis, colon spasms and constipation – but no one suspected she had cancer.
She said: “I remember saying to my GP that I have a history of bowel cancer on my mum’s side of the family.
“I think, because of my age, it was just assumed that it could never be cancer, though.”
Concerned in case her carer role was making her stressed and impacting on her health, Sophie switched to become a teaching assistant at her local special needs school in December 2018.
