A YOUNG mum diagnosed with aggressive stomach cancer says she plans to stop all treatment.
Georgia Gardiner has possibly just months to live – but said the experimental chemo she’s been enduring is ruining her quality of life.
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Instead, the 28-year-old, from Leeds, wants to focus on spending time with her little boy Arlo.
The toddler understands his mum is sick and often wipes away her tears.
Georgia was diagnosed with stage four poorly differentiated gastric adenocarcinoma on June 13 – and given a prognosis of around a year from that point.
The mum-of-one said doctors were baffled as that form of the disease usually affects men in their 70s and 80s.
“I’m the youngest they’ve seen with this type of cancer,” she told The Sun.
“It’s incurable, so my options are to prolong my life.
“They did genetic testing and they can’t figure out how I’ve got the cancer because none of my family have had it.”
Georgia is part of a clinical trial which involves three drugs “which aren’t approve yet” in the UK, including immunotherapy and a five-day chemo cycle.
The first round of treatment was on July 24 and the second on August 14, at St James University Hospital in Leeds.
Georgia said: “It’s really brutal and I don’t think I’m going to continue because it’s not going to cure me, so it’s taking away from the quality of life I have with my son.”
She explained: “I have a five-day chemo cycle that’s attached to a pump that they send me home with.
“I do a one and a half hour chemo cycle whilst at the hospital.”
Describing the first round, she continued “At the hospital nausea came over me and I couldn’t stop being sick.
“I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t move. I was just sick constantly and I was really ill with it.
“Even the hospital said I had a really rough go of it.”
During the second round several weeks later, the sickness came back and the doctors opted not to attach the five-day pump.
“I took out the PICC line and refused to have it put back in, because all the wires, it was no good for my brain.”
Georgia said she lost six kilograms in four days during the treatment.
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“I’m just wasting away. I’m coming out of the cycle I’ve just done. I still haven’t been able to eat since last Thursday (August 14).”
She said the doctors can’t really give a proper life expectancy due to this cancer usually highly rare in young people.
“They gave me a prognosis of a year when I received the diagnosis,” Georgia explained.
Instead, she is hoping to be still alive when Arlo goes to primary school.
“These are the milestones I’m giving myself. Instead of going off what the doctors say, my goal is seeing my son in primary school, which is two years instead of one year,” she said.
“I try to give myself real life milestones instead of medical milestones, it’s something more positive.”
She added: “How I see it is if I have 10 months I’m going to make every single day count.”
Georgia said Arlo is aware she’s unwell.
“He does understand, he rubs my tummy and says I’ve got ‘boo boos’,” she explained.
“He knows I’m not well, he wipes my tears, which breaks my heart. He’s very much aware that something’s not right.”
What is poorly differentiated gastric adenocarcinoma?
Poorly differentiated gastric adenocarcinoma is an aggressive form of stomach cancer where the cancer cells look immature, unlike normal cells, and tend to grow and spread more quickly.
This type of cancer, often classified as part of the diffuse subtype, is associated with a poorer prognosis, a higher risk of metastasis to lymph nodes and distant sites, and more complex treatment challenges.
Symptoms can include dull upper abdominal pain, a feeling of fullness, indigestion, and unintentional weight loss.
Georgia has already raised over £17,800 for treatment in Germany – but said it would be the same drugs used in the clinical trial that’s made her feel so unwell.
Instead, she plans to use the money to make memories with Arlo, including taking him to Disneyland for his third birthday in November.
And anything left over will go into a savings account for when he’s older.
She said: “He’s all I think about, all the things I’m going to miss in his life. I get emotional talking about it.
“He’s at an age where he’s not going to remember me, which breaks my heart.
“So, I’d like to create as many memories, videos, pictures as possible so in the future he knows how much I loved him.
“I’d love to take him to Disneyland, either Paris or Florida – he loves Disney films so it’d be perfect.”
Georgia described how she been going “back and forth” to the doctors for a year before she was diagnosed.
“I couldn’t eat and was having heartburn and sickness, and then weight loss,” she explained.
“They’d been sending me home with acid reflux medication – they weren’t really taking it much further because I was otherwise healthy.
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“I went to hospital A&E one time because I was in excruciating pain, I couldn’t move, I was being sick.
“They sent me to minor injuries, and they sent me back to the GP.”
Eventually, she was sent for an endoscopy on May second.
“They took me into a side room and that’s when they were really concerned it was cancer and then everything went really quickly from there,” Georgia recalled.
“A week after that I got the stage four diagnosis and they told me it’s incurable and there’s nothing they can do.”
Referring to when the news was broken to her, Georgia said: “I started to laugh.
“I was with my partner and I burst out laughing. I was looking at them like ‘are you being serious? Is this real?’
“I think I went through every emotion in that room. I had to take a break and come back, I just couldn’t understand why or how.
“Sometimes I still feel what the hell. It’s quite surreal.”
Georgia added: “Other than the weight loss and the sickness I feel healthy. I don’t feel like I’m dying of cancer, until I do the treatment.
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“That’s when I feel like I’m dying, the treatment is really brutal.
“I don’t know how people survive doing that, the older generation having chemo. It’s pumping poison into your body.
“I just have to keep going until I can’t go on any longer really.”
Georgia said she would encourage anyone who feels unwell to “advocate for themselves”.
“Especially women, I think women tend to be dismissed a lot more,” she continued.
“Since I’ve been diagnosed and spoke to a lot of people, I don’t think women are taken seriously when it comes to their health at all.
I was being dismissed time and time again, I didn’t feel I was being taken seriously at all by some medical people.
“The kind of cancer I’ve got goes from stage one to four in a matter of months so if I’d have been taken seriously when I first started to go.
“I do believe it would have been caught at a point where it wasn’t incurable.”
“I had to wait six weeks to get my first doctors appointment. It’s ridiculous, the health system is failing people massively,” she added.
For Georgia’s GoFundMe page see here.
Have you had a similar experience? Email ryan.merrifield@thesun.co.uk
