‘I knew it': Sign 28yo had ‘aggressive' cancer
Sam Bulloch, now 30, began to notice some bleeding when she went to the toilet — something that she put down to haemorrhoids.
But, two years ago, her bathroom habits — such as a change in how many times she needed to use the restroom — made her stop and think. Ms Bulloch realised she wasn't eating as best she could as she had just switched careers and was a busy new librarian, often opting for quick and easy, cheap meals, so she put it down to the changes in her diet.
But it was Ms Bulloch's depleted energy levels that eventually made her see a doctor, thinking she was having issues with her iron levels and even possibly anaemia — which had happened previously. It got to the point where the young librarian couldn't walk up a flight of stairs without being puffed.
A GP sent her off for a blood test and an ultrasound, also under the belief that it could be to do with her iron levels. But when a tumour was found in Ms Bulloch's colon — as well as spots on her liver and lungs — doctors discovered she had stage 4 colon cancer.
'My first reaction was, 'I knew it. When I started Googling after the ultrasound, when things started to get serious, I knew something was wrong,' she told news.com.au.
Ms Bulloch said it prompted her to look back at her health history, and she realised the blood she found when she went to the bathroom likely wasn't haemorrhoids as she initially suspected.
'When I found out it was cancer, my mind when to the worst place possible. And, just because it was so advanced at the time it was found, I just didn't have a lot of hope, to be honest.'
It wasn't Ms Bulloch's first brush with a deadly cancer. Two decades prior to her diagnosis, the then 28-year-old's mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.
'There's a lot that I don't remember from most of it, and by that I just mean life felt quite normal all things considered,' she said.
Looking back, Ms Bulloch said she is now in shock and awe at how her mother handled breast cancer with such grace. Eventually, it spread to her lungs and her brain.
'I do remember when she started to decline, and I feel like that's what sticks in my mind the most — just watching her get sicker and sicker,' she recalled.
'I think the hardest part was just watching her change and not feel herself. Towards the end, it was impacting her speech and cognitive function. She just didn't feel like the mum I knew in those last months.'
It was this knowledge of how brutal chemotherapy could be that scared Ms Bulloch, as she'd had a front-row seat to her mum's decline.
With cancer such as Ms Bulloch's, there was a few lines of standardised treatment. This includes two types of chemotherapy, with the third being to combine the two treatments for a more aggressive approach. She started off with a specific chemotherapy regime, and after doing some genetic testing to see what else could be given alongside the treatment, a more targeted therapy was also applied.
Her body responded well to that, and she was treated for 10 months before its effectiveness was questioned by her doctors. Ms Bulloch was then put on a different targeted therapy before she was eligible for surgery.
'We were doing the surgeries with the intention to remove all the cancer — which, spoiler, sadly didn't happen,' she said.
The first surgery was called an high anterior resection, which saw all of her sigmoid colon and the top part of her rectum removed. Cancer was also removed from her liver. Two months later, she had another liver resection which saw the whole right lobe of her liver removed. There were plans to operate on her lungs, where cancer was also found, but at the last minute her treatment options were switched. She is now on a different chemotherapy.
Ms Bulloch is sharing her story on behalf of Australian Cancer Research Foundation's Centre for Dynamic Immuno-Oncology at The Alfred in Melbourne. The centre looks at the potentially lifesaving potential of immunotherapy, with a grant allowing researchers to watch cancer cells interact with a patient's immune system in real time.
This removes the need for things such as blood or tissue samples, and could allow researchers to find a more targeted approach for a person's individual cancer.
Ms Bulloch said one of the chemotherapies was among the first ever created and had been around for 60 years.
'That's a good thing in some ways, but it's also really rubbish to receive. It makes you so sick,' she said.
'With chemotherapy, you kill everything and so you have a lot of collateral damage with that. Whereas with targeted therapies, it looks for something specific.
'And I mean, I'm no doctor, of course, but I'm convinced that the incredible response I had to treatment at the beginning was because of the targeted therapy.'
Ms Bulloch had side effects to her treatment, such as a severe rash, but she said this was nothing compared to other types of treatment that left her bedridden and unable to have a semblance of regular life.
Carly du Toit, General Manager of Australian Cancer Research Foundation, told news.com.au that immunotherapy is one of the most important breakthroughs in cancer treatment.
'But right now, it's only effective in some patients and others experience severe side effects or minimal results,' she said.
'Until we unlock its full potential for all patients, we haven't truly delivered on its promise. At ACRF, our mission is to change that. By supporting world-leading research, like the ACRF Centre for Dynamic Immuno-Oncology, we're working to ensure that this lifesaving treatment becomes a reality for everyone who needs it.'
Colon cancer falls under the banner of bowel cancer, with the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners reporting that it was up 266 per cent from the 1980s among 15 to 24 year olds.
Ms Bulloch said no two cancers were alike, and so she believed treatment options needed to be tailored. The young librarian also said she is sharing her story to show that colon cancer can impact anyone, and it's important to be on the lookout for what the signs are. She said she's had friends confide in her, and she wants these types of conversations to be normalised.
'When it started happening to me the first thing I felt was embarrassed, which is so silly, that I was embarrassed that I was having bleeding,' she said.
'I just let the embarrassment stop me from doing anything or telling anyone about it.'
She said she will continue to advocate so that others can have full autonomy over their health. And, for Ms Bulloch, she said focusing on the everyday moments of joy while dealing with everything that has happened over the last two years is helping to get her through it all. At the beginning of this year, she met her partner Sam on Hinge when both were initially set on deleting the app for good.
'It's been a couple of months now we've done so many fun things but also he's sat with me in some really tough things,' she said.
'I went through losing my hair shortly after meeting him, getting bad scan results — like the poor things really like not come into my life at a mountain top moment.'
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