A mother-of-four has been given months to live after she first mistook her difficulty swallowing for a side effect of a weight loss diet.
Camilla Chapman was diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer almost a year after she first developed symptoms of the disease.
The 40-year-old from Chichester, West Sussex, received the devastating news in February that her cancer had spread to her lungs, liver and lymph nodes and told it was inoperable.
“I was told there was nothing they can do; they can’t operate, and it is not curable. I was only offered palliative chemotherapy,” she told The Independent.
The nursery business owner said the diagnosis has left her with “no hope”, but she is urging others not to ignore seemingly minor ailments.
In March last year Ms Chapman noticed she was struggling to swallow her food — a tell-tale sign of stomach cancer — but she assumed it was a side effect of her new diet.
“I was on a low-calorie diet and a lot of the diet was liquid based, but one of the solid foods you could make were pancakes and quite often they would get stuck in my throat. I would need to drink water with them,” Ms Chapman said.
“I ignored it, thinking it was just because I hadn’t been eating properly and maybe I had just got lazy at chewing. I thought my body was just used to swallowing liquid and not food,” she added.
In June she noticed a small lump underneath her jaw and visited her GP, but she did not mention her difficulty swallowing.
Ms Chapman was referred for an ultrasound scan, but she said doctors told her “it’s normal to have one gland slightly larger than the other” and that “nothing was wrong”.
The scan, which Ms Chapman said showed no signs of cancer, put her mind at ease for several months, until she found it even harder to swallow food.
“I noticed it more often and it would keep me awake at night. I started to have a gut feeling that something wasn’t quite right,” she said.
By January she still struggled to swallow food and decided to go back to her doctor.
This time Ms Chapman was referred for a blood test, and three weeks later she had an endoscopy to examine her digestive tract and a biopsy was taken.
“The endoscopy was awful and as soon as he said they were going to take biopsies, I knew they had found something,” she said.
Ms Chapman was sent for another CT scan a week later in February. She was then told the devastating news that her cancer had spread to her liver, lungs, and lymph nodes on both sides of her oesophagus and that it was inoperable.
More than 6,000 Britons are diagnosed with stomach cancer every year, according to Cancer Research UK.
Symptoms include difficulty swallowing, weight loss, stomach pain, feeling full after eating small amounts, feeling sick and tiredness due to low levels of red blood cells.
Stomach cancer can also spread to the lymph nodes — a system of tubes and glands in the body that filters body fluids and fights infection. This can cause lymph nodes to feel hard or swollen. Swollen lymph nodes in the chest can also make it difficult to swallow.
Treatment for stomach cancer usually involves surgery and chemotherapy, but Ms Chapman said she has only been offered palliative chemotherapy — a type of treatment given to help someone live longer and more comfortably even if they can’t be cured.
She claimed there are no other options on the NHS available to her and she has been left feeling desperate to find an alternative.
“I don’t want to take chemo; I have four young boys, and I want to still be able to go to the park with them. I don’t want to live whatever time I have left in sickness,” she said.
Now Ms Chapman is warning others to not ignore any unusual symptoms and to get them checked out by a doctor.
“Difficulty swallowing is a symptom of stomach cancer, but because I didn’t have any other symptoms, such as acid reflux, I dismissed it,” she said.
“It is easy to dismiss it can be just a small change, maybe how you swallow or sound, but I would tell anyone who had the same symptoms as me to just go and get it checked out,” she added.
About 65 per cent of people with stage one cancer are expected to survive for five years or more after they are diagnosed.
But for those with stage four cancer, meaning it has spread to distant parts of the body, there are no five-year survival statistics, Cancer Research UK explains.
Instead, just 20 per cent of people diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer survive for one year or more after their diagnosis.
