Bowel cancer: Everyone said Natalie’s new mum fatigue was normal until a trip to the dentist revealed the ‘sinister’ truth

“Your gums are super pale.”

Those five words a dentist uttered in 2018 may well be the reason Natalie Diepenhorst is still alive today.

Because if he hadn’t said anything, the new mum might not have discovered the postpartum symptoms everyone assured her were “normal” were actually the first signs of bowel cancer until it was too late.

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More than 14,000 Australians are diagnosed with bowel cancer every year and more than 5000 Aussies lose their lives to the disease annually.

It’s the second deadliest type of newly-diagnosed cancer in the country, even though 99 per cent of cases detected in the earliest stage can be successfully treated.

The mortality rate is so high because fewer than 50 per cent of cases are detected early, which Diepenhorst only learned after her earth-shattering diagnosis.

”I’ve known now a number of mums in the same situation as me who weren’t as lucky, and their kids don’t have a mum anymore,” she tells 9honey.

Have you got a story? Contact reporter Maddison Leach at mleach@nine.com.au

Diepenhorst started experiencing extreme fatigue around the time she welcomed her first child in 2018, but put it down to being a new mum.

Everyone else agreed it was ”normal parent fatigue” and she didn’t think anything of it until the dentist’s comment rang alarm bells.

Pale gums are a telltale sign of anemia, and when she finally saw a GP, they confirmed the diagnosis.

“I was really anemic, the doctor was like, ‘How are you still standing?'” she says.

“I’m like, ‘I’ve got a newborn baby! She is my life and I do everything for her, that’s what you do as a mum.'”

Over the next six months she underwent three iron infusions, but the anemia didn’t resolve, so her GP ordered a routine colonoscopy to check for any internal issues.

As soon as the anesthesia wore off, Diepenhorst knew from her surgeon’s face that they’d found something terrible; it was bowel cancer.

“He told me that there was a five centimeter tumor in my large intestine, and we needed to act quickly,” she says.

The average age of diagnosis for women is about 72 and Diepenhorst was shocked to receive a diagnosis at 32 years old, but almost 900 women under the age of 50 are diagnosed every year.

Told her cancer was stage four and there was only a 13 per cent chance she would survive for five years, the new mum was suddenly confronted with her own mortality.

“It’s just so unfair that my daughter could have a life without a mother,” she says.

“That was probably the most difficult week I’ve ever had to live.”

Everything changed when Diepenhorst went for surgery and doctors discovered the cancer was actually only stage two, making it much more treatable.

They removed the tumour, part of her bowel, her appendix, and almost 40 lymph nodes, but because the cancer had been caught early Diepenhorst didn’t have to undergo chemotherapy.

She was soon declared cancer-free.

Very few of the 14,000 Aussies diagnosed with bowel cancer every year experience an outcome like that and knowing how lucky she was stirred something in Diepenhorst, who is a medical researcher by trade.

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“The government are spending less and less on medical research, but we need it more and more,” she says.

So she threw herself into bowel cancer research and now works working alongside Cure Cancer-funded researcher Dr Peter Georgeson to develop a personalised screening tool that could detect bowel cancer before symptoms even appear.

It would be a game-changer for early-onset cancer detection, allowing thousands of Aussies a better chance at survival.

About 30 per cent of bowel cancer cases involve a family history or hereditary contribution and Diepenhorst knows her daughter, who is still young, is at increased risk for that very reason.

Her own grandfather died from bowel cancer, her mother was diagnosed a year after her, and Diepenhorst is determined to improve the way we talk about, diagnose and treat the disease so that young Aussies like her daughter have a better future.

“I would really like to normalise bowel cancer as not being just an older person’s disease, it can happen to anyone and it’s so treatable if detected early,” she says.

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“There’s no harm in going to your GP and having some extra tests, just having a conversation to make sure that you’re OK.”

She encourages women to advocate for their health and urges new mums not to fall into the trap of believing concerning symptoms are a “normal” part of parenthood.

Above all else, she wants to see a future where no more children lose their mothers and fathers to this deadly disease.

Cure Cancer has been funding pioneering cancer research since 1967 and continues to back research projects across every cancer to save and change lives. Learn more here.