"I'm 41 years old and I'm dying. I don't know how long I've got - a week, a month, a year. Nobody is talking about a decade," Haelwyn Adams wrote in The Times.
Adams had been troubled for years by stomach pain that she said "tormented" her, but doctors blamed it on bad period pain, IBS, stress or, after she and her husband Luke started IVF, hormonal side-effects, as she was young, fit and healthy.
After she became pregnant and suffered another miscarriage, Adams asked for a colonoscopy to explain the pain. A doctor told her she was "simply too young to have colon cancer" and instead arranged a sigmoidography of only the lower bowel.
A scan that changed everything
When she became pregnant again and reached her 20-week scan, her pain was finally taken seriously. "On the way to the toilet before we left, another wave of pain threatened to knock me over. My mask of bravery slipped; I leant against the wall, sweat pouring off me, my legs shaking," she wrote. "A doctor on the foetal medicine team was walking past and - just like that - I was in a bed and being sent for a scan."
The scan showed a malignant tumour in her colon with a rare mutation. It had already spread to her liver.
A difficult choice
Doctors gave Adams a choice: end the pregnancy so they could remove the tumour and begin chemotherapy immediately, or continue with the pregnancy while surgeons removed as much of the primary tumour as possible. The second option would protect the baby but dramatically reduce her own chances of survival.
Adams called it "the easiest decision ever." She felt pain whenever her unborn daughter kicked. Eventually, the baby was delivered at 32 weeks because Adams could hardly breathe, with liver tumours pressing against her lower lung.
Life after birth
Her daughter, Magnolia Sunshine, was born and immediately separated from her mother. "From that moment, my days telescoped into a binary routine, by night, journeying into the natal intensive care unit to sit with my daughter, by day, journeying to the edge of my will to live. I had been willing to die for her, but living for her now seemed almost too hard," Adams wrote.
In January, she was briefly cancer free and hoped the super-aggressive chemotherapy had worked. In March, however, the cancer returned with tumours in both sides of her liver. Her treatment is now about management rather than cure.
Marriage and fundraising
Adams married Luke in June, in case she died during an operation to reverse the stoma from the colostomy she had during pregnancy. "It's hard marrying someone to make them a widower but Luke is the love of my life, my person, my team-mate - and I know how strong he is," she said.
The couple set up a JustGiving page, hoping to raise £150,000 to "protect my husband and little girl from the financial burden this disease leaves behind."
