Former The News, Portsmouth reporter Elise Sargent is currently undergoing treatment for stage 4 bowel cancer. She wanted to highlight her diagnosis in Bowel Cancer Awareness month.
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00:00Hello, hi, my name's Elise and for a long time I was a reporter at the news in Portsmouth and while I was there I did many, many stories, inspirational stories on people who battled cancer and overcame cancer but never did I imagine that I would be fighting my own battle.
00:18It's Bowel Cancer Awareness Month this month and I really wanted to talk about what's happened to me. In January I was diagnosed with stage 4 bowel cancer which has spread to my liver, my lung and the lining of my stomach and I had absolutely no clue that I wasn't well.
00:40I was really fit, I was really healthy, I was just doing everything that a 44 year old would do, being fit and active so it came as a really really enormous blow to me.
00:51So I'm sharing my story in the hope that people won't do what I did which was I ignored blood in my poo.
00:58For about 6 months over 2024 I was so tired that sometimes I'd have to sleep through my lunch hour, I was just completely exhausted.
01:08But I put those things down to loans, to stress, I didn't do anything about it and I really really hope that anybody reading this or watching this, reading my story, if they have any of those symptoms will go to the Bowel Cancer UK website and check out if any of their symptoms tally with what might be bowel disease and just go to your doctor.
01:31If you get pushed back, go back again and say I'm really worried that this could be bowel cancer.
01:38At the moment my bowel cancer is incurable, there is no cure for it so I'm starting chemotherapy but that's really in the hope that it prolongs my life.
01:50But I'm just really praying that the miracle will happen and that the tumours will shrink and that I can be operated on to take the cancer away.
01:59But I just want my story to inspire somebody else so that they are not in this position.