A woman has shared her ordeal of getting her tragic cancer diagnosis after complaining of worrying symptoms for years.
Claire Boulton, 47, who suffers from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), says she raised concerns with doctors about stomach pains, nausea and blood in her stool for five years prior to her shock diagnosis in April 2019 – on the morning of her wedding day.
The former carer has now been living with cancer on and off for the past five years and will be undergoing major surgery this week (January 16), which will hopefully lower the risk of further spreading. However, mum-of-two Claire claims she was initially never taken “seriously” despite her regular appointments for her IBS.
She was even left feeling like a “burden” after doctors informed her she’d be losing weight if she had cancer. One medic even reportedly told Claire, who was struggling with weight gain, that she was “too fat” to have the awful disease.
Claire, who feels that she was “fobbed off” by dismissive medics, was determined to get to the bottom of her issues, however, and ended up undergoing a colonoscopy. Then, just as she was busily preparing to walk down the aisle to her husband, Matthew Boulton, Claire received a call from doctors, letting her know that cancer had been detected in a polyp removed from her rectum.
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Bride Claire had put on weight due to health issues, and later underwent gastric sleeve surgery
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Claire, of Thornbury, South Gloucestershire, recalled: “I was shocked. You can’t write my life. On my wedding day I literally was sitting in the hairdressers that morning. I got a phone call from the doctors to tell me that they had found cancer in my polyp.
“The polyp had been removed from my body, but there had been cancer in it. They said, ‘by the size of the polyp, the possibility was the polyp itself had been growing for at least five years’. I thought, ‘All this time of me saying there’s something wrong, actually, there was something wrong’.
“It was a nurse that rang me up, and when I said, ‘I’m literally sitting in the hairdresser about to get married’, she was like ‘, Oh my god, I’m so sorry; if I had known, I wouldn’t have told you’. I was a bit numb. It hadn’t really sunk in. I rang him and said ‘I’ll see you in a few hours but guess what I’ve just been told’. He said, ‘Oh my god, are you alright?’.
“I said ‘, Don’t worry, it’s not in my body now; I don’t have cancer; I had cancer’. I didn’t know I had it because it was in the polyp.”
She continued: “I didn’t have to have any chemo or anything because it was contained and they removed it. Had they not found it, it could have spread quite quickly. That was a lucky break. We went to the registry office [in Kingswood, South Gloucestershire] with my children and parents. Literally straight after, we went to the airport and jumped on a week away to Palma Nova, Spain.
“That week wasn’t really a honeymoon. That whole time, it was like s**t, I’ve just found out I’ve had cancer, and I still might have it in my body somewhere, and I won’t know for six weeks. It played on my mind.”
Claire jetted off on honeymoon with her husband Matthew, knowing that the cancer could have spread elsewhere
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Then began a six-week wait for test results, which would determine whether or not the cancer had spread. It was during this time that she and Matthew flew to Sidari, Corfu, with her husband for a more relaxed second wedding, held at a small chapel.
Then, on May 22, 2019, just as she was about to exchange vows with Matthew for the second time, Claire received another important phone call – this time letting her know the cancer had been contained.
Looking back on her ordeal, Claire reflected: “It’s just insane it happened to be on both of my wedding days. That to me is our wedding. Matt always says our wedding anniversary is the day we legally got married, but to me, that was a sad day finding out I had cancer.
“To me the day I found out I didn’t have it and that I was definitely all clear and stood there in my wedding dress taking that phone call, that is the day I like to celebrate. It’s just insane it happened to be on both of my wedding days.
“It was just amazing and so special. I couldn’t have been happier to do it any other way. It was just me, my husband, and two children. We go back every year to the same destination. That place is our place. If the worst case happens and I don’t make it out of this operation, my husband is to go there to spread my ashes there. It’s just the most important place on the planet to us.”
The former carer has lived with cancer on and off for five years
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She’s now about to undergo another major surgery
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Back in 2009, Claire was diagnosed with fibromyalgia – a chronic and painful condition which caused her to lose mobility and body and pile on four stone. At the time, doctors argued Claire’s weight gain meant there could be nothing “seriously” wrong with her bowels.
According to Claire: “Things got quite bad for me in my late 30s. I would sit there on the sofa and [follow through after passing wind]. Then halfway through eating, especially meat, I’d have to go to the toilet. My bowel habits were getting worse. They were liquid, I was finding blood. I’d go to the doctors and they’d say ‘it’s fine, it’s IBS and haemorrhoids’.
“I was like ‘okay, but I don’t feel well. I’ve got stomach pains and I’m overweight’. Because of my fibro affecting my physical being, I was doing a lot less physically, and I was gaining weight. I’d gone from 6st to nearly 20st. During this whole time, I just kept being told, ‘You’re gaining weight; there’s nothing serious with your bowels; if it was anything serious, you’d be losing weight’.”
“At one point, I even got told I was ‘too fat for cancer’. When I eventually got my diagnosis, I was like, ‘Are you f**king kidding me? I got told I was too fat, and now I have cancer’. I wanted to march into the doctor’s surgery, and I wanted to tell that doctor what a p***k he was.”
She has now had to adjust to life with a stoma
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In October 2020, Claire underwent gastric sleeve surgery to lower her chances of stomach cancer, before also getting a full hysterectomy. Then, in April 2022, Claire began feeling “unwell” and begged her consultant to schedule her for a colonoscopy, even though she had one arranged six months down the line. It was then that another tumour was found on her colon.
Claire remembered: “I felt unwell. I just didn’t feel right. I’d been going to the gym and trying to get my life back on track and I just felt like there was something wrong. They found a tumour along the transverse colon. [The consultant] said to me at the appointment, ‘if you hadn’t pushed to come in when you did and listened to your body, you might not be here’.
“I’m very much a strong believer of ‘listen to yourself’. If you think there’s something wrong, I don’t care how many people tell you you’re not, get it checked. Be 100 per cent sure. Make them look at you. If I’d just sat there and gone ‘it’s not due for six months’, I realistically probably wouldn’t be here today.”
A few months after this tumour was discovered, Claire underwent a resection to have most of her bowel removed When this was unsuccessful, she had no choice but to have an emergency stoma bag fitted.
Claire shared: “It is hard living with a stoma. You see all these celebrities and stuff out there but they show the perfect days, not always the bad days. There are difficult days for all of us. But still, I’m alive. That’s the thing you have to remind yourself of.
“I’ll wake up some mornings and hate it. Some mornings I wake up and I’m annoyed with [the stoma]. Because it’s leaked or I woke up in a bed of faeces or I walked out that day and it’s leaked and it’s stopped me doing something I want. Your life changes really dramatically. I don’t sleep for more than two hours a night, emptying it all the time. You find a new way. It’s just another change to life.
“But at the same time, it’s much better than before when I wouldn’t leave the house because I would have to put a sanitary towel on or because I had to wear nappies because I was faecally incontinent. At the age of 40, it wasn’t normal.”
Matthew and Claire first met in a nightclub on Claire’s 22nd birthday. They say her health ordeal has made them “stronger” as a couple and that they are still able to enjoy married life. Highlighting the challenges they’ve faced, Claire said: “Everything in our life has been a challenge. And you grow stronger, and then this happened and it was like ‘when am I going to get a break’.
“My husband has just been amazing. He is my rock. Nothing phases him. He’s woken up covered in s**t and been like, ‘never mind’. I don’t know how many people could do that. It’s all the little things.
“The day he married me, I was at the heaviest weight I’ve ever been in my whole life. He married me at the worst point in my life. I’d just found out I had cancer, I was the fattest I’d ever been, and he chose, after all those years of being with me, to marry me. I can’t even put that into words how that felt that day.”
Going forward, Claire now wants to help spread awareness, and has urged others to seek second opinions and tests if they feel something could be seriously wrong, before “it’s too late”.
Claire warned: “Having bowel cancer, you’re told you’re too young, then too fat and everything else. There’s so many of us that are young. It’s just being heard. Any change at all in your bowel, or you’re not feeling well within yourself for whatever reason that may be, go and see a doctor.
“If you get told ‘it’s nothing, it’s nothing’ and nobody’s tested you, insist on tests and ask for a second opinion. You don’t want to be a burden. That’s how I felt, ‘I’m a burden. I’m just fat and eat the wrong foods. There must be something wrong with me in what I’m doing, it must be my fault’.
“But if you know in your heart of hearts, then you’ve just got to go with it. If you’ve got blood in your poo, stomach aches and are struggling with your bowel habits, there’s something wrong, even if it’s not bowel cancer. Don’t just get fobbed off with IBS. It’s always better to find it’s nothing wrong than to find out it’s something and you did nothing about it, and it’s too late.”
A Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire Integrated Care Board spokesperson stated: “We’re sorry to hear of this patient’s experiences, and we encourage them to contact the ICB’s customer services team so that it can be fully investigated.”
For more information or support about cancer, you can contact Macmillan Cancer Support or you can call 020 7940 1760 for advice.
Do you have a story to share? Email me at julia.banim@reachplc.com
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