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At 42, Danielle Ripley-Burgess has survived colon cancer three times. She was first diagnosed at 17, then at 25 and then again at 39, making her a part of the trend of colorectal cancer rates surging in younger people. The Kansas City, Missouri, mom shared her story with TODAY.com and urged others to speak up about their symptoms.I had a cancer everyone thought old people get.
Towards the end of my 8th grade year, when I was 14, I started seeing specks of blood in my stool when I’d go to the bathroom. I didn’t know what was happening. I downplayed it and tried to convince myself it was no big deal.
I thought, I’m eating something red and that’s probably what I see. So I put myself on a “no red foods diet” and stopped eating anything that was red in color: everything from candy to pizza to salsa to raspberry Popsicles.
It took me a while to accept that I was actually seeing blood, but I still hid it from just about everybody I knew. I was already embarrassed about puberty changes happening, so that on top of this thing was just too much. I didn’t want to be sick and I didn’t feel sick at first.
But it was nagging at me, so about a year or two later, I did mention something to my mom. We looked it up online, and we saw it was probably hemorrhoids. She said blood in stool could also indicate something more serious, but it was something for people who were my grandparents’ ages.
I was like, “great, I have hemorrhoids,” and went on with my life. In high school, seeing blood in the stool became something very normal, even as it got redder, darker and scarier. Eventually, I had some intense stomach pain, and I was getting fatigued. I couldn’t play volleyball anymore. I just wanted to come home and sleep.
When I was 16, I told my boyfriend I thought I needed to see a doctor, but I didn’t tell him the details. My mom overheard one of our conversations and realized I was still seeing blood. She told my dad and they called the doctor, who sent me to a gastroenterologist right away.
Just a few weeks after I turned 17, I was diagnosed with Stage 3 colon cancer. I had chemotherapy, radiation and surgery to remove the tumor. I also had surgery to move my ovaries up into my stomach to protect them from radiation. Doctors wanted to save the ovaries to preserve hormone function, but by elevating them, I couldn’t naturally conceive anymore.
I thought I had beaten cancer. I was getting colonoscopies every three years, and after one of them, I woke up and saw the very same look on the doctor’s face that I had seen eight years prior. 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 way harder this time. I got really angry at a lot of things, but deep down just angry at God — how could you let this happen to me again? By this point, I was married, I had a house, I was working on a career, we’d been talking about adopting a child. All of a sudden, I realized I could lose all of these things.
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