A brave woman has shared her battle with bowel cancer and the four warning signs she had before being diagnosed. She is also urging others to be more vigilant than she was.
Ellie Wilcockknown, known as EllieWilcock0 on TikTok, is a fighter who’s conquered stage 4 bowel cancer and since become an advocate for health awareness.
In one of her videos, Ellie details the initial symptoms that led to her diagnosis. “Symptoms that led to my stage 4 bowel cancer diagnosis,” the survivor starts her video off by saying.
“So, number one was pain in the left hand side of my tummy and my pelvis. I thought for a long time that it was a urine infection and it might have gone to my kidneys because it was kind of one sided. It went from my front round to my back.”
Ellie recounts how despite her suspicions, test results showed no signs of infection, prompting her to seek additional medical investigations for the persistent pain, reports Gloucestershire Live.
Ellie also opened up about the extreme fatigue she experienced. “Number two, for me was fatigue,” she admits.
She described a significant shift in her routine where, instead of engaging in normal post-work activities, she found herself completely drained and often sleeping through the evening.
The third red flag was something she only recognised in retrospect. Ellie recounted: “Number three is one in hindsight that I probably had, was a change in my bowel habits and blood in my poo.”
Shedding light on the symptom that can be easily overlooked but is potentially indicative of cancer, she added: “This is one to really keep an eye on and check your poo. I’m such an advocate for that.
“If I done that, which I didn’t, I would have found my cancer sooner before it got to stage 4.”
Discussing unexplained weight loss as her fourth warning sign, she said: “I wasn’t actually losing weight, because the lack of appetite was quite infrequent.
“Most of my appetite was fine, but in hindsight, I remember having nausea and not wanting to eat as much because my bowel obviously wasn’t normal.”
By the end of the video, she stated: “Hope this helps.”
In a heartfelt recount of her journey in another video, titled “surgery that took me from stage 4 to no evidence of disease”, she said she was first told she had stage 4 bowel cancer on Valentine’s Day in 2022.
“And on that day they formed a stoma,” she added. She then described the extent of the cancer: “My cancer spread from my large bowel into my ovaries, my uterus, my fallopian tubes, my peritoneum, my momentum as well as my liver.”
Detailing her grueling procedure, Ellie spoke of the extensive surgery that lasted 10 hours, where surgeons removed her reproductive organs and primary tumour.
“I then had a bowel resection, where they removed the primary tumour,” she said, before detailing the extraction of cancer from her stomach’s lining.
“Because they managed to clear all the cancer from my abdomen, they also reversed my stoma, so I no longer have a stoma bag,” Ellie revealed.
In the final moments of her video, she courageously declares: “I can’t have children, but it is 100% worth it because it saved my life.”