- Shannin Desroches was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer at 26 years old.
- Desroches, who’s active and eats a clean diet, was initially told she likely had a gluten allergy.
- After feeling dismissed, she booked her own scans and was diagnosed with cancer.
A little over a year ago, Shannin Desroches started buckling over in pain after every meal.
She was an active, 26-year-old woman following a clean diet, so her family doctor in Ontario suspected it could be a gluten allergy or celiac disease, ordering bloodwork to confirm.
The tests came back negative. She pushed for more, like a CT scan. Because Canada’s healthcare system is public, wait times were longer. The CT scan she was scheduled for was a year out, in October 2024.
In the meantime, she tried to mitigate her extreme abdominal discomfort by eating smaller snacks. Still, she was frequently constipated, had pencil-thin stools, and felt a nagging pain in her left side.
“No matter what I ate, I was in excruciating pain, pretty much yelling for help,” Desroches, now 27, told Business Insider. “I knew with my symptoms I wasn’t going to make it” to the scan, she said.
Desroches was eventually admitted for an emergency colonoscopy in early 2024, but the procedure couldn’t be finished — the tumor in her colon was too big. The GI specialist “couldn’t get the camera through,” she said.
She was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, given a three-year life expectancy. She’s part of the growing demographic of young people developing colorectal cancer, and wishes colonoscopies were more routine for people under 45 — the recommended minimum age.
“If I had a colonoscopy done, I could have caught this even in stage 2 or 3,” she said. “That’s the most frustrating part to me, knowing that I shouldn’t have to be here fighting stage 4.”
From dismissal to emergency surgery
Desroches started with an MRI in April 2024, which she managed to book thanks to the help of a family friend. When she left the room, her family friend and a GI surgeon were waiting for her. “They were like, ‘I don’t want to freak you out, but we need to admit you, you have a blockage,'” she said.
A colonoscopy the next morning confirmed it was a tumor, and she was immediately admitted to a six-hour surgery, which removed part of her large intestine where the tumor was located, her right ovary, 13 lymph nodes, and part of the membrane lining her liver. The surgeon couldn’t remove the large tumors on the liver itself without causing liver failure.
When she woke up in the morning with her husband by her side, the surgeon broke the news: she had stage 4 cancer. If they wanted children, the doctor recommended starting egg retrieval from her left ovary right away, because the cancer was likely to spread quickly.
“I remember just almost disassociating,” Desroches said. Once the doctors left, she and her husband broke down. “We just had a good cry together and just bawled.”
Searching for care options
Desroches decided to pursue immunotherapy, a specialized treatment that trains her immune system to attack the cancer cells in her body, alongside two chemotherapy drugs.
Chemo became complicated. On round 13 of receiving oxaliplatin, a chemotherapy drug, Desroches went into anaphylactic shock, and had to stop taking it.
“It was probably the scariest feeling I’ve ever felt, knowing that my body is literally shutting down on me,” she said.
So far, the results of her treatment make her nervous: her CT scan in January was the first one in which her tumors didn’t shrink. She doesn’t know what to anticipate for her next one, in April.
In the meantime, Desroches is searching for other options. The surgery she needs, a hepatic arterial infusion pump to deliver chemotherapy drugs directly into her liver, is only available as a clinical trial in Canada — one she doesn’t qualify for because she has cancer outside her liver.
The procedure is more routine in the US, but her oncologist said the treatment could cost $500,000 or more when considering testing, a US hospital stay, and treating any complications — something that isn’t financially feasible for her.
She’s now looking into options in Europe and started a GoFundMe page for her cancer treatments. “It’s very overwhelming, but when you’re in fight-or-flight mode for your life, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “You just do it.”
Focusing on the future
Since starting treatment in 2024, Desroches and her family are trying to stay optimistic.
In October, Desroches married her husband, Cody Desroches, at a beachside wedding in Jamaica. “I would do anything to go back to that day,” she said.
They’re planning to have kids, too.
A week after her surgery, Desroches met with a fertility doctor to begin her egg-freezing process immediately. “This was the most pain I’ve ever been in,” she said. She was nauseous from the hormone injections, dry-heaving so hard that she felt her surgical staples would rip open.
After her surgeries, she said she’ll never be able to carry her own child, but hopes she and her husband can use a surrogate one day.
It’s hard to picture her future, she said. “It’s just natural when you’re at this age — you’re always thinking about what’s next,” whether it’s planning a trip, renovating her house, or having kids. At the same time, she never knows if she can commit to a family gathering or if she’ll feel too sick to attend.
She savors every moment with her loved ones, a contrast to her “busybody” life as a nurse prior to cancer treatment.
“I try not to focus on that three-year mark because that’s just a statistic,” she said. “That’s not me.”
