A 38-year-old Canadian woman went to the hospital to get surgery to repair her colon, which she had ruptured after a long battle with chronic pain, constipation and inflammation. The doctors told her that she was getting an ostomy, where waste would be excreted into a bag through an external opening in the abdomen. However, the woman, identified as Devlynn Cyr, woke up from the surgery to the harrowing news that she had stage 3 colon cancer. Even more shocking was that while she was under anaesthesia, doctors gave her a hysterectomy because "everything was like concrete".
"My husband gets a phone call halfway through surgery saying, 'Here's the problem. We found a tumour and it's cemented to my uterus,'" Ms Cyr told People magazine. She revealed that initially, her husband Greg thought the call meant that his wife's surgery was already over and it was a good sign. However, the doctors later told him that his wife had a tumour the size of a baseball and in order to safely remove the tumour, they needed to do a hysterectomy.
"Okay, so this is happening and this just got a lot more real," Mr Greg recalled, adding that he was afraid his wife of six months would "be mad at me and resent me for having to make that decision. We had talked about having children". However, according to the outlet, the doctors explained to him that because of what the cancer had done to Ms Cyr's Fallopian tubes and uterus, "there wouldn't be a possibility anyway".
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This meant that the 38-year-old woke up to this awful news. "All of a sudden, my husband sits on the bed and he's like, 'I gotta tell you something,' and my heart sank. He said, 'I had to make a decision, and they gave you a hysterectomy, but you have no ostomy bag.'" Ms Cyr said.
She told the outlet, "I couldn't process the hysterectomy because I'm like, 'I now don't have an option of children?'" She added that she wanted to know, "Did they retrieve some eggs for me to be able to have children in the future? Like, do they even think of these things?"
Sadly, no eggs were retrieved for Ms Cyr and the sudden reality was heartbreaking. From there, she turned to social media for others who may have been in the same situation concerning cancer and fertility. She started sharing her ups and downs of having cancer and the hardship of her marriage or a relationship on TikTok. She said that she doesn't shy away from sharing the brutal realities of cancer.
According to People, Ms Cyr has been told that her cancer has a 50% chance of recurring if she doesn't undergo chemotherapy. So she will soon begin the six-month process. "I don't want to, but I don't wanna die either," she said.
