A single mom of three got some devastating news — and now she has to break it to her children.
After being diagnosed with bowel cancer — also called colorectal cancer — in November 2020, Louise Hayward has now been told she has just months to live.
“They know about my cancer but I haven’t been able to tell them I’m dying,” a distraught Hayward said of her children.
Colorectal cancer affects the large bowel, which is made up of the colon and rectum. In the United Kingdom, bowel cancer is the fourth most common cancer and the second biggest cancer killer, according to Bowel Center UK. About 43,000 people are diagnosed with it each year in the UK.
The American Cancer Society estimates there are 106,970 new cases of colon cancer and 46,050 new cases of rectal cancer in the US for 2023. Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer in the US, excluding skin cancers.
Before her diagnosis, the 48-year-old mother had noticed blood on her feces and remembered having such severe bleeding that she had to “sit on a towel” to stop it.
“I felt like I was giving birth — that’s how bad the pain was,” Hayward told South West News Service.
Hayward, who is from Whitchurch in Bristol, initially put off seeing a doctor due to the coronavirus pandemic, but they eventually found a 7-centimeter tumor in her bowel.
She began chemotherapy and radiotherapy after finding the tumor, but her cancer spread to her liver and lungs after two years.
In November 2022, she was told that further treatment was no longer viable.
“They told me there is nothing else they can do — I was devastated,” she shared. “All of this is so scary; I was never expecting to be told I was dying.”
Hayward is concerned about what her children will do when she’s gone — and how she will tell them.
“It’s so hard to accept that, in reality, I am going to die soon,” she said.
She has three kids: William, 19, Faith, 9, and Louie, 7. Only her eldest is aware of the prognosis.
“It’s so unfair on them. I just think, ‘Why did they have to be born into this life?’” she said. “How do I tell them they’re going to lose their mum at such a young age?”
As a single parent, Hayward has “done everything” for her children, especially her youngest, Louie, who relies on her.
The three kids will be raised by Hayward’s sister, Rachel, 47, when she passes, and until then Hayward’s spending her time trying to set them up with financial support.
“All I can do is try to raise some money for them after I have passed,” she said.