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Another young life lost to bowel cancer. Jen McEntee sadly died on October 27th aged just 35 years old. I knew Jen on social media following her @irish_bowel_cancer_journey account on Instagram. She was doing an amazing amount of raising awareness about bowel cancer documenting her own journey. Her bowel cancer story is all too familiar being a young person whose symptoms were ignored for way too long. However, Jen had been NED (no evidence of disease) and making a good recovery after surgery and chemotherapy, so this awful news has come as a terrible shock. I had a message a couple of days ago from her husband Dave informing me of her passing. She’d had an aggressive reoccurrence of the cancer in her ovary and very quickly was on palliative care.
Jen was incredibly supportive of my own bowel cancer fundraising and raising awareness efforts. She was one of the 12 wonderful ladies from the bowel cancer community who narrated the final post penned by the late Nicole Cooper on the day she died at the beginning of the year. Jen also made a generous donation to the fundraising effort for that music release.
But what I will remember most about Jen is just how kind she was. Back in January she asked for my address and sent me a large bar of toblerone and some Irish chocolates after reading a post I’d written about not getting a toblerone for Christmas. It was such a kind and generous act and it summed her up for me. The last time we messaged was after my own small procedure in the summer. On reflection I think she had a lot on her mind about her own health, but she still was asking how I was doing. It must have been around this time that her reoccurrence was diagnosed…
Sadly, too many younger bowel cancer patients are still having their symptoms dismissed and getting misdiagnosed, meaning that their eventual diagnosis is at stage 4 when long term survival chances are greatly diminished. When diagnosed at the early stage 1, bowel cancer can be successfully treated in over 90% of cases. Early detection is vital, so much more still needs to be done to stop patients like Jen having their symptoms dismissed as something else…
My thought’s are with Jen’s family and friends. She will be greatly missed by those of us who got to know her just a little in the bowel cancer community. Tonight I have proudly begun eating a bar of toblerone in her memory x
