Mom, 35, with colon cancer recalls ‘weird’ stomach symtom: ‘Quite a shock’

Weeks after grappling with norovirus, Jessica Wozniak’s stomach felt off. She continued experiencing cramps, pains and occasional bouts of diarrhea.

“I was like something’s weird with my stomach, but maybe I still have some lingering effects of the norovirus or the flu, or maybe I ate something,” the 36-year-old from Wheaton, Illinois, tells TODAY.com. “I just kept feeling not very well.”

After an ultrasound, she was diagnosed with a cyst, but her symptoms continued, and a CT scan detected inflammation in Wozniak’s bowel. A colonoscopy found that she had cancer.

“(The doctor) says, ‘Yeah, you have two masses in your colon that are cancerous,” she recalls. “It was quite a shock.”

‘I wasn’t feeling normal’

In February 2024, Wozniak contracted the norovirus.

“It was vomiting, diarrhea,” she says. “It was pretty graphic and bad.”

While she slowly began feeling better, she never completely rebounded and “wasn’t feeling normal in my digestive system,” she explains. Wozniak and her husband were planning on having another child to join their daughter, and Wozniak had stopped taking her birth control pills. She wondered if that contributed to how she felt.

“These things all happened at the same time,” she says. “I gave it a couple of weeks.”

Her GI symptoms lingered and worsened. When she had a telehealth visit in April, she mentioned them to her doctor.

“I said, ‘Gosh, I’m getting stomach cramps every morning. While I was eating breakfast, I just doubled over with cramps,’” Wozniak recalls. “They asked me some questions and were like, ‘Oh, it could be ovarian cysts. I think you should go get a CT.’”

Wozniak went to the emergency room, and the wait time was so long that she decided to schedule with one of her providers and went to the midwife group who delivered her daughter.

“They were a little bit dismissive, like, ‘Well, yeah, this is an ovarian cyst. That sounds exactly what it is. It’s going to be a lot of pain. You probably have gas pain, too,’” she says.

They ordered an ultrasound and assured her the cysts would “rupture of go away on their own” and she would be “fine.” The technician detected an ovarian cyst but noticed something on the ultrasound on her left side but felt unsure of what it was.

At one point after that visit, it seemed like the cyst had burst because Wozniak experienced “terrible pain.” But her stomach cramps never improved.

“Every time I had to have a bowel movement, it was pain, it was cramping,” she says.

Her primary care doctor ordered a CT, which found bowel inflammation. That prompted a colonoscopy. Even still, the doctor didn’t seem overly worried.

“The gastroenterologist was like, ‘I don’t think this is cancer,’” Wozniak says.

But when she woke from her colonoscopy, Wozniak learned she did have cancer.

“I was diagnosed early June of 2024 with colon cancer,” she says.

While Wozniak knew her paternal grandparents had colon cancer, they were in their 60s when they were diagnosed. Her paternal aunt learned she had colon cancer at 47, and Wozniak’s father received a colon cancer diagnosis around the same time as Wozniak. It wasn’t until she was diagnosed that she learned there could be a genetic link.

“No one had ever told me that there was a genetic test I could do,” she says. “I was diagnosed with Lynch syndrome.”

Lynch syndrome is an inherited genetic mutation that increases one’s risk of developing a variety of early-onset cancers, including colon cancer.

“It’s still a shock to me that … this didn’t cross anyone’s mind, and here I was at 35 being diagnosed with Stage 4 (colon cancer),” she says. “This really shouldn’t happen. We should have known. There’s things out there to learn about sooner.”

People with Lynch syndrome often undergo a variety of cancer screenings in an effort to detect any cancers at an earlier stage, and they also might receive different treatment after diagnosis. For example, Dr. Matthew Yurgelun previously told TODAY.com that immunotherapies — treatments that bolster the immune system to fight the cancer — work “exceptionally well,” in many Lynch syndrome-related cancers.

Wozniak’s doctors recommended a treatment plan that included four rounds of two immunotherapy drugs, which she began in July. A CT scan after those treatments showed that her liver metastases, were shrinking but another mass in her sigmoid colon appeared to be growing. Her doctors wanted to shrink and reduce most of her masses so they could perform surgery with clear margins.

“My doctor’s recommendations was to continue the immunotherapy and add on chemotherapy,” Wozniak says.

But before Wozniak could start the new treatment, her insurance at the time, Cigna, denied it and recommended that she only do chemotherapy.

“They said, ‘No, no, no, immunotherapy is not working,’” she says. “My doctor said, ‘It is. Here’s the scan that shows the liver (masses) getting smaller.’”

Wozniak learned she could appeal, but she felt stunned by her insurance.

“I thought, ‘Who are you to decide that for me? You’re not my doctor,’” she says. “It made me really upset. It made me really angry.”

She and her family took to social media to ask what she could do, and people offered suggestions, including working with her human resources department at work on the appeal, which she did. She also reached out to the pharmaceutical company asking if she could pay for it directly. NBC Chicago covered her story in February.

Wozniak soon learned her treatment would be covered by her insurance.

Cigna provided TODAY.com with a statement:

“We have developed clinical guidelines to ensure that all patients receive safe and appropriate care. Our guidelines are based on published medical literature, leading clinical experts, and for oncology, the guidelines of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network and the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Our physicians work collaboratively with treating physicians to adapt these guidelines to each person’s unique health needs and circumstances. Patients and their physicians can ask for expedited reviews for urgent needs, which are completed within 72 hours. Our processes worked as intended for Ms. Wozniak and her treatment was approved within 24 hours.”

‘You really have to speak up’

Wozniak is undergoing her eighth round of treatment. Afterward, doctors want to perform an MRI to see how the masses have responded. There’s a tumor near her pelvic wall that doctors worry they cannot yet remove with clean margins. Since July, she’s hoped that she could undergo surgery.

“They’ll remove the majority of my colon except a small piece at the end and they’ll re-route my small intestine to take over that bit,” she says. She will likely also undergo a combination of resection and ablation in her liver.

Wozniak has six masses in her liver, but the surgeon believes they can be addressed. At some point, she will have a hysterectomy because Lynch syndrome can cause uterine cancers, and she’ll also have her fallopian tubes removed to protect against ovarian cancer.

While facing Stage 4 cancer feels tough at times, Wozniak hopes her story encourages people to fight for their health.

“I hope people learn that they’re their own biggest advocate. That no one is going to do it for you,” she says. “If you don’t agree with something that’s happening or you’re feeling something in your body that other people are denying or saying isn’t there, you really have to speak up.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com