Jenny Duncan, 45, is talking candidly about her fight with colon cancer and her remorse for keeping her symptoms a secret from her doctor out of shame.

In 2019, while on vacation in Lanzarote, she noticed her first symptoms, but she brushed them off. She blamed her stomachaches and blood on the toilet paper on stress and excitement as she began a new job in the UK as a head teacher.

Jenny even took pictures to document the bleeding, but she kept them a secret until her husband happened to stumble upon one of them. She was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer shortly after he encouraged her to get medical attention, which alarmed her.

Jenny acknowledged, “I assumed bowel cancer only affected older men.” She attributed the bloating, gas, and exhaustion she had been experiencing to her heavy workload. She was too embarrassed to talk candidly with her physician.

She started chemotherapy at the same time that COVID-19 struck the UK, so she had to deal with the surgeries and treatments by herself. In 2022, she was informed that the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes and was now incurable, even though her tumor had vanished.

She was devastated by the news. “I completely lost it. “‘I’m going to die,’ I kept saying,” Jenny recalled. She focused on spending time with her adult sons and went back to work after a period of withdrawal.

Jenny currently has stage 4 bowel cancer and is regularly scanned. She will resume treatment if her health deteriorates. “I’m grateful for every day,” she says, in spite of the uncertainty.

She hopes that by sharing her experience, others will be inspired to not conceal or disregard symptoms. Blood in the stool, abdominal pain, exhaustion, unexplained weight loss, and changes in bowel habits are all warning signs of bowel cancer, according to the Mayo Clinic.