Teaching kindergarten is exhausting. But when Mariely Del Valle started napping every day after work early last year, she knew something was off.
“I would immediately get home at 4:30-ish and take a nap from 5 to 7 p.m., which wasn’t the norm,” Del Valle, 41, told TODAY’s Craig Melvin in a segment aired March 8. In the evenings, when Del Valle would wake up from her nap, all she could manage was a shower before heading to bed again. Still, she never felt rested.
Around the same time, Del Valle noticed she was becoming sensitive to certain foods. “I was getting bloated” she said. “When I would eat certain things, it would mess up my stomach.” Soon after, she noticed a difference in her bowel movements and blood in her stool. She cut out certain foods, but “it wasn’t helping at all,” she said.
When Del Valle consulted her doctor, he recommended an endoscopy and a colonoscopy, even though she wasn’t yet 45, the recommended age for screenings.
“So, I scheduled this colonoscopy,” Del Valle said. “But I canceled it three times because I was scared.” She initially scheduled the procedure for April, didn’t show, rescheduled it for May, didn’t show, and then scheduled it again for June, when she finally went.
At age 40, Del Valle was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. There was a golf-ball-sized tumor in her colon, which had already metastasized to her liver. When she heard the news, “I got really hot throughout my body. My knees started, to hurt immediately. My first words were, ‘I have a son.’ And then I said, ‘I don’t want to die.'”
After five rounds of chemotherapy to shrink the tumor, Del Valle had surgery to remove it, along with two pieces of her liver and a portion of her colon.
“I can’t believe I was diagnosed with cancer at 40,” Del Valle says. “I’m still young. I have a whole life in front of me.”
Colon cancer affecting younger ages
Colon cancer has been rising for years in…
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