NEED TO KNOW
Danielle Ripley-Burgess first noticed blood in her stool at 14, but waited years before telling anyone.
He was diagnosed with Lynch syndrome, a genetic disorder that increases the risk of several cancers.
After her third colon cancer diagnosis and numerous surgeries, she now urges others not to be embarrassed and report unusual symptoms.
After surviving colon cancer three times, a Missouri woman is opening up about the major symptom she should never have hidden.
Danielle Ripley-Burgess – a 42-year-old mother of two from Kansas City, Missouri – was just 14 when she first noticed bloodstains in her stool. She didn’t know what was happening so she ignored it, convincing herself that it wasn’t serious.
“I thought I’m eating something red and that’s probably what I’m seeing,” she recalled in an interview with Today. “So I went on a ‘no red foods diet’ and stopped eating anything red in color: from candy to pizza, salsa and raspberry popsicles. »
“It took me a while to accept that I was seeing blood, but I always hid it from almost everyone I knew,” she continued. “I was already embarrassed by the changes that were happening with puberty, so on top of that, it was just too much. I didn’t want to be sick and I didn’t feel sick at first.”
It took a year or two before Ripley-Burgess finally told her mother, who initially suspected it was hemorrhoids. But later, she started experiencing more symptoms like fatigue, severe stomach pain and increased blood in her stools. So her parents took her to see a gastroenterologist.
A few weeks after her 17th birthday, she was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. She underwent chemotherapy, radiation and surgery to remove the tumor.
“I thought I had beaten cancer. I was having colonoscopies every three years, and after one of them I woke up and saw the exact same look on the doctor’s face that I had seen eight years before,” she said. “He saw a polyp that later turned out to be cancerous. I had no symptoms. At 25, I had stage 1 colon cancer.”
“Mentally and emotionally, it was a lot harder this time,” she continued. “I was really angry about a lot of things, but deep down I was just angry at God. How could you let that happen to me again? At that point, I was married, I had a house, I was working on a career, we were talking about adopting a child. All of a sudden I realized I could lose all of those things.”
Woman lying in a hospital bedCredits: Getty
Because she had no family history of colon cancer, doctors performed additional tests and later determined that Ripley-Burgess had Lynch syndrome, a genetic disorder that significantly increases the risk of developing colon, uterine and several other types of cancer, according to the Mayo Clinic. Understanding her risk, she underwent a preventative hysterectomy and subtotal colectomy, removing all but about 13 inches of her colon.
Although she did what she could to reduce her risk, her annual colonoscopy in 2023 revealed that her cancer had returned. At this point, Ripley-Burgess decided to have a permanent ileostomy, removing the remainder of her colon.
“I wasn’t expecting it, but I wasn’t completely shocked either,” she said of her third diagnosis at age 39. “Living with Lynch syndrome, I’m always aware that it’s a possibility. It’s always in the back of my mind: Could this symptom or this pain or this strange thing happening in my body be something major?”
Never miss a story: subscribe to PEOPLE’s free daily newsletter to stay up to date with the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
“At this point, I’ve had just about every surgery possible to prevent cancer. I don’t have a colon anymore. I can never get colorectal cancer again, and that was a relief,” she added.
Ripley-Burgess is now sharing her story in hopes of raising awareness as more young people are diagnosed with colon cancer. She hopes others will learn from her mistake and seek medical attention when unusual symptoms appear.
“If I could go back and tell my younger self anything, it would be: Don’t be self-conscious about your body,” she told the outlet. “If you see something with your body that is uncomfortable and weird, and you’re not yet ready to talk to a doctor, talk to someone, a friend or family member. Don’t sit in that place: something is wrong with your body and you don’t know what it is. Don’t sit alone. Don’t minimize what you see.”
Read the original article on People
Gn Health
