After surviving colon cancer three times, a Missouri woman is opening up about the major symptom she never should’ve hidden.
Danielle Ripley-Burgess — a 42-year-old mom of two from Kansas City, Missouri — was just 14 years old when she first noticed specks of blood in her stool. She didn’t know what was happening so she ignored it, convincing herself that it wasn’t a big deal.
“I thought, I’m eating something red and that’s probably what I see,” she recalled in an interview with Today. “So I put myself on a ‘no red foods diet’ and stopped eating anything that was red in color: everything from candy to pizza to salsa to raspberry popsicles.”
“It took me a while to accept that I was actually seeing blood, but I still hid it from just about everybody I knew,” she continued. “I was already embarrassed about puberty changes happening, so that on top of this thing was just too much. I didn’t want to be sick and I didn’t feel sick at first.”
It took a year or two before Ripley-Burgess finally mentioned it to her mom, who initially suspected it was hemorrhoids. But she later started experiencing more symptoms like fatigue, severe stomach pain, and the blood in her stool intensified. So, her parents took her to see a gastroenterologist.
A few weeks after her 17th birthday, she was diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer. She underwent chemotherapy, radiation and surgery to remove the tumor.
“I thought I had beaten cancer. I was getting every three years, and after one of them, I woke up and saw the very same look on the doctor’s face that I had seen eight years prior,” she said. “He saw a polyp that later turned out to be cancerous. I had no symptoms. At 25, I had stage 1 colon cancer.”
“Mentally and emotionally, it was way harder this time,” she continued. “I got really angry at a lot of things, but deep down just angry at God — how could you let this happen to me again? By this point, I was married, I had a house, I was working on a career, we’d been talking about adopting a child. All of a sudden, I realized I could lose all of these things.”
Woman lying in a hospital bed
Credit: Getty
Because she had no family history of colon cancer, doctors did additional tests and later determined that Ripley-Burgess had Lynch syndrome, a genetic condition that significantly increases the risk of developing colon, uterine, and several other types of cancer, according to the .Understanding her risk, she underwent a preventative hysterectomy and a subtotal colectomy, removing all of her colon except about 13 inches.
Despite doing what she could to lower her risk, her annual colonoscopy in 2023 revealed that her cancer had returned once again. At that point, Ripley-Burgess decided to get a permanent ileostomy, removing the rest of her colon.
“I wasn’t expecting it, but I also wasn’t completely shocked,” she said of her third diagnosis at age 39. “Living with Lynch syndrome, I’m always aware that it’s a possibility. It’s always in my mind: Could this symptom or this pain or this odd thing happening in my body be something major?”
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“At this point, I’ve had just about every surgery I could have to prevent cancer. I have no colon left. I can never get colorectal cancer again, and that was a relief,” she added.
Ripley-Burgess is now sharing her story in hopes of raising awareness as more and more young people are being diagnosed with colon cancer. She hopes others learn from her mistake and seek medical attention when unusual symptoms first appear.
“If I could go back and tell my younger self something, it would be: Don’t be embarrassed about your body,” she told the outlet. “If you’re seeing something with your body that’s uncomfortable and weird, and you’re not ready yet to tell a doctor, tell somebody — a friend or family member. Don’t sit in that place of: something is wrong with your body, and you don’t know what it is. Don’t sit there alone. Don’t downplay what you’re seeing.”