Woman told she had ‘postnatal depression’ diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer

A mother of two prescribed antidepressants after complaining of fatigue was devastated when she learned she had stage four bowel cancer and had just nine months to live.

Helen Canning complained of anaemia and low energy for more than a year, but as a 37-year-old with two children under the age of five, her symptoms were put down to prolonged postnatal depression and work stress.

“At the end of the school day, I’d sit at my desk and lose half an hour of my time just sitting and staring,” the A-level science teacher from Suffolk said. “I was so tired. Then I would get even more stressed because I was getting behind on my work.”

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Mrs Canning was also experiencing a painful sensation below the left side of her hip, which she said felt like “someone was inserting a tennis ball below my hip bone”.

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“I was in my late-30s, so I was in an ‘in-between’ stage, unsure if my periods were causing the fatigue and pain, or if I was heading towards perimenopause,” she told The Independent. Because she had previously been treated for an ovarian cyst, she went to the GP to flag her symptoms.

During the appointment, she told the GP about her fatigue but she said this was dismissed as low iron because she did not eat red meat. And as a mother to two girls Erika and Marla, aged four and two at the time, she was also told she had prolonged postnatal depression.

Despite being told her iron was low, she said she was never offered a blood test to investigate this further.

As well as prescribing antidepressants, the GP referred her to a gynaecologist for an ultrasound scan on her left side in December 2020, but the scan did not detect anything.

But less than a year later in August 2021, she was diagnosed with bowel cancer after she was rushed into A&E with a “crippling, stabbing pain” and violent vomiting, the night before her ninth wedding anniversary.

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She was told she had advanced colorectal cancer, a primary tumour in the right side of her colon, with secondary growths on her ovaries, liver, and peritoneum.

“Because the pain was on the left side, the initial ultrasound focused on that area,” she said. “They didn’t look at my right side, and that’s where the tumour was,” she added, explaining that the growth was pushing her organs to her left, which had caused the pain.

“I keep thinking back to the ultrasound scan they did less than a year before my diagnosis. If only they had looked at the right side as well.

“As a science teacher, I always say to my kids, never accept the answer, look for the reasons. I felt like this wasn’t done for me. I wish someone just said, ‘let’s take a blood sample and see what’s going on’.”

After months of testing after her diagnosis, she was also told she had the aggressive BRAF mutation, the same as the late Dame Deborah James and BBC newsreader George Alagiah.

Mrs Canning is now part of Breaking BRAF, a group of colorectal cancer patients and carers “who want fair access to approved treatments and trials that other developed countries offer, but the NHS currently do not”.

She said: “We also want to improve the quality of information out there on BRAF, to help empower patients to be involved in their own care, and to help oncologists understand how to treat their patients in the best way possible.”

Though Mrs Canning was given only nine months to live after her diagnosis, the mother of two leaned on her family for strength as she started chemotherapy. It has now been over two years and she continues to fight.

Now she is determined to raise awareness of the common signs and symptoms of bowel cancer, and urges people to “know their own ‘normal’ and not be afraid to keep pushing for further testing and answers when doctors don’t”.

According to the NHS, the main symptoms are: