When Georgia Carter felt pain on her right side, she thought she had pulled a muscle while lifting weights at the gym. It was actually a warning sign of something much more serious.
The pain eventually led the 44-year-old woman to have an ultrasound of her gallbladder, which resulted in a devastating diagnosis: stage four metastatic colon cancer.
A tumor was found in her intestines, along with lesions in her liver, rectum and sigmoid colon. The cancer was spreading rapidly.
She had few other symptoms, but told FEMAIL that going to the toilet was never ‘completely satisfying’ and that she had been ‘not feeling well’ for months before. Looking back, she said there were also signs of blood in her stools, but that this often coincided with her period.
“It wasn’t quite right. I had changed jobs and was coming out of a stressful, pressured situation, so I attributed a lot of that to anxiety and stress,” Georgia said.
‘When I got a new job that offered a better work-life balance, the symptoms surfaced and I became confused.’
The diagnosis came as a complete shock to Georgia, as there is no history of colon cancer in her family, while her mother had leukemia.
The ultrasound and CT scan ‘revealed everything that was going on’.
Georgia Carter (pictured) was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer 12 months ago
The 44-year-old from Western Australia said she experienced few common symptoms and had no family history of cancer
The day after her gallbladder ultrasound twelve months ago, Georgia was called back for what she thought was a routine check-up.
“I thought they were going to tell me I had to have my gallbladder out or something. When you’re told it’s cancer, it hits you really hard. It’s like a panic attack, a hyperventilation moment,” she said.
‘I went to the appointment alone, so I called my husband and he dropped everything to come with me.
‘Since then I understand why GPs come too late. I stayed as long as I needed.’
Four days later, she was in the hospital to have a port placed in her chest for chemotherapy.
Colon cancer can cause you to have blood in your stool, a change in your bowel movements, a lump in your bowel that can cause an obstruction. Some people also suffer from weight loss as a result of these symptoms
“They couldn’t do a proper colonoscopy because the tumor was so big it was blocking the bowel,” Georgia said.
She did undergo surgery to have a stent placed in her colon to reduce the risk of an obstruction.
A week later she started chemotherapy, which worked well and killed the cancer cells. However, the deadly cells ‘tore’ away from the stent and perforated her bowel, causing further problems.
“After the second round of chemo I was in so much pain and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Everyone said it was the treatment so I just bottled it up to the point where I couldn’t eat or keep anything down,” Georgia said.
‘I was almost dead. There was nothing left in my intestines. That was because my intestines were perforated and my abdominal cavity was full.’
Georgia (pictured with her husband) also ‘almost’ died when her bowel was perforated
She was rushed into emergency surgery, where surgeons removed a third of her bowel and the primary tumor. Georgia called it “the silver lining” of the ordeal.
In August last year she spent five days in intensive care and three weeks in hospital. She was treated from mid-September to the end of April.
Since then, Georgia has been ‘rebuilding her strength’ and three weeks ago she had surgery to check her liver, which was ‘not in good condition’ due to the treatment.
“The positive news is that I am pretty confident that my bowels are completely free of tumors. The cancer is now only in my liver, but in difficult places, which makes it difficult for doctors to remove,” Georgia said.
She has now started treatment again to reduce the lesions as much as possible.
Now she is taking it one day at a time, is ‘focused on getting her mindset right’ and will undergo treatment for the next six months.
Although doctors are confident that chemotherapy will shrink the remaining cancer cells, Georgia is still concerned that the cancer cells will spread again. Still, they are hoping for the best.
Cancer has changed her life and that means she also has to live with a stoma and faces physical challenges.
Now she’s taking it day by day and if she’s ‘focused on getting her mindset in the right place’, she’ll undergo treatment over the next six months
“I’ve always been physically strong. I did strength training and was the strongest woman my physical therapist worked with. I was very proud of that,” she said.
‘In the last 12 months I have lost 35kg and I am not as strong as I used to be. I know I am stronger in other areas but building that strength up is an impossible mountain to climb at the moment.
“I refuse to let this become my personality and my illness become who I am. So I push through it. The days that I push myself further than I think I can, I get physically exhausted and then I sleep better,” she added.
“I’m never going to feel sorry for myself all the time.”
To get through the tough times, Georgia remembered a mantra from a book by Sarah Polley: Run toward danger.
“So you deal with it head on, instead of trying to hide it and run away from it, because you’re never going to get better, you’re never going to get stronger if you don’t face those issues or if you don’t face what you’re going through,” Georgia said.