'Fit and Healthy' Mom of 3 Learns UTI Is Something More Serious After Insisting on Full-Body Scan 

The mum-of-three discovered her urinary tract infection was actually stage 4 colon cancer – and it was only discovered after she insisted on a full body scan.

Zoe Gardner-Lawson’s symptoms began in August 2024 with a dull ache in her lower back, but the 36-year-old mum, from Bracknell, England, says her doctor assumed it was a urinary tract infection and prescribed antibiotics .

However, after three doses of antibiotics, “there was just no change,” she told the South West News Service via The Daily Mail. “I really got worse. I was practically bedridden — I felt so bad, and the pain in my back spread to my stomach.”

Zoe Gardner-Lawson with her husband Sam and three children: Leo, Izzy and Odin.

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The pain was so bad that in September, Gardner-Lawson, who has a 5-year-old son and 1-year-old twins with her husband Sam, went to the hospital, where initial tests led doctors to believe she had kidney stones. But when the surgeon told her “it looked like I had fluid in my abdomen,” Gardner-Lawson says, “I told them I wasn’t going to leave until I had a full-body CT scan.”

And the test may have saved her life, as the scan showed that Gardner-Lawson had a 5cm tumor on her bowel – which led to the human resources manager being diagnosed with stage four colon cancer on September 30.

Not long after, on October 3, she underwent a four-hour operation to remove the tumor. She is now undergoing chemotherapy and told the publication: “Since everything is fine, I will have to be booked in for another operation – to remove the remaining abdominal lymph nodes and two tumors on the liver.”

Zoe Gardner-Lawson with Izzy, one of her three children.

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Her prognosis is not terrible, she says, ‘I’m young enough that they don’t consider it a terminal diagnosis yet. If all goes well, I still have a chance to achieve ‘disease-free’ status, but it all depends on the next few years.”

Her family set up a GoFundMe to help pay for her treatment, sharing that she was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive variant that doesn’t respond as well to standard treatments.”

Zoe Gardner-Lawson with her husband Sam.

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Gardner-Lawson, who shares updates on her Instagram page, @cancer_is_a_pain_in_the_butt. she’s also training for a 5K, explaining, “The impact of exercise on cancer is amazing so that’s my motivation.”

Although she has always been “fit and healthy”, Gardner-Lawson says she is speaking out because she believes the age limit for colon cancer screening should be lowered to “at least” 30. “If my disease had been caught earlier, it would have been easier to treat,” she said.

Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education