A Canadian woman went into surgery thinking she was getting an ostomy bag fitted, only to wake up and find her uterus removed after being diagnosed with stage three colon cancer.
Devlynn Cyr, 38, posted a TikTok video back in September of her in a hospital bed, still taking in the overwhelming news and what her body had been through while she was under anaesthesia.
Her colon had recently ruptured due to bouts of constipation, inflammation and chronic pain, so she went into surgery thinking she was getting an ostomy.
The surgery was supposed to create an opening from an area inside the body to the outside, where a bag would be fitted to collect excrement.
However, while she was in surgery, the hospital called her husband to ask permission “to take out my entire lady bits,” she explained in her TikTok video.
While under anaesthesia, she said surgeons found out that she had stage three colon cancer and her ovaries were “not proportionate to her body” and more like a child’s.
In an interview with People, Ms Cyr explained that the tumour was “cemented” to her uterus.
When her husband, Greg Cyr, got the call from the hospital, he initially thought that it was them ringing to say the surgery was over, but instead, he was told his wife had a tumour the size of a baseball, and to remove it, she would need to undergo a hysterectomy.
“Okay, so this is happening, and this just got a lot more real,” Mr Cyr told the outlet, saying he was afraid that his wife would “be mad at me and resent me for having to make that decision. We had talked about having children.”
Mr and Ms Cyr were only six months into their marriage when this life-altering situation changed their plans for the future.
Just a few months ago, Ms Cyr had miscarried a baby, so tragedies in their fertility journey were all too fresh.
However, the hospital explained to Mr Cyr that the cancer had already corrupted her Fallopian tubes and uterus, so “there wouldn’t be a possibility anyway” of having children, he said.
Ms Cyr and her husband were planning on having children together— (devlynncyr/TikTok)
When Ms Cyr woke up, she learned of her cancer diagnosis but also had to deal with the fact her uterus was removed from her body.
“I gotta tell you something,” Ms Cyr recalled her husband telling her, at which point her heart sank. “He said, ‘I had to make a decision, and they gave you a hysterectomy, but you have no ostomy bag.’”
“I couldn’t process the hysterectomy because I’m like, ‘I now don’t have an option of children?” Ms Cyr told People. “Did they retrieve some eggs for me to be able to have children in the future? Like, do they even think of these things?”
While she was happy that her husband did the right thing, she was devastated by the news, so she turned to TikTok to try and find solace in people with similar experiences.
She posted the video from her hospital bed on 26 September and went to sleep with 88 followers, and when she woke up, she had almost 13,000, the outlet reported.
Ms Cyr explained that she has been documenting the ups and downs of her cancer journey on TikTok.
While she said to the outlet that she has had some comments asking why she would go into such horrific detail about her cancer, she said that videos like these, that other people with cancer can relate to, are the ones that make her feel less anxious about her own diagnosis.
“A lot of people were like, ‘Thank you. This is exactly how I felt. I was scared, too. Now, I know that I don’t need to be,” she told People.
Ms Cyr, along with the support of her husband, is now undergoing chemotherapy to prevent the cancer from recurring.
