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.