After undergoing four major operations in an attempt to cure a heart condition, Hannah Curtis was delighted to be told the last one had been a success, and she could finally move on with her life.
But just one week later, the 22-year-old Auckland woman had to put her future on hold when she was given the shocking news that she had bowel cancer. “I didn’t think it was happening to me,” she says.
Hannah’s life changed dramatically four years ago when the seemingly fit and healthy teenager was diagnosed with atrial tachycardia, a potentially fatal condition that made her heart rate speed up to almost twice the normal rate. “Most people’s hearts beat between 70 to 90 times per minute,” she explains.
“I would be doing something as normal as drinking tea and my heart would be beating around 120. At that rate, most people would have just finished a 100m sprint.”
Before her diagnosis, Hannah had lived an active lifestyle, running 5km a day and riding horses. But despite her fitness, she would often become dizzy and suffered a series of fainting spells. Doctors told her that the condition may have been brought on by her constant exercising.
“I thought I’d just have to go through one operation and it would be a quick fix,” she says. But when that initial operation failed to cure her, Hannah had to go through two more to try to fix the problem.
Sadly, each one failed, and time in and out of hospital combined with continuous blood tests and constant medication led to Hannah gaining 20kg.
Each operation she went through would put her to the test. “They’d put a tube into my groin, follow the main artery to my heart and try to blast away the cells that were causing my heart rate to go up,” she says.
“I wasn’t allowed to go under full anaesthesia either, in case my heart rate slowed down, so I’d be awake throughout the operation. It was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced.”
After her third operation failed to make a difference, Hannah’s doctors looked overseas for help. They soon found it at Australia’s Melbourne Heart Centre in the form of Professor Jonathan Kalman, a leading heart surgeon. This time, Hannah came round after the operation to be told she’d been cured.
“I thought finally I could start living my life,” she says. Elated, Hannah was sent home to Auckland to rest and started making plans to get back on her feet. “As soon as I was given the all-clear, I joined a local hockey team. I couldn’t wait to exercise again.”
But it wasn’t to be. She had started to notice new worrying problems – particularly chronic rectal bleeding. Thinking it had something to do with the medication she was on, Hannah went to the doctor and, after undergoing a colonoscopy, was given the worst possible news – she had bowel cancer.
A tumour was found inside her large intestine, and doctors had also discovered an 8cm wide cyst on one of her ovaries. Being diagnosed with bowel cancer at 22 is particularly young and doctors said hers may have been hereditary, which meant every member of her immediate family had to undergo testing.
Hannah was devastated. “It just didn’t seem real, especially when I was supposed to play my first hockey game that day too,” she says.
Soon after she got the news, the pretty brunette was back in hospital for surgery on her large intestine and to remove the cyst. When she woke up, her large intestine had been shortened from 1.5m to 30cm and tests had been sent off to find out if the ovarian cyst was cancerous.
Finally, Hannah got some good news – the surgery had completely removed all the cancer, which ruled out the need for chemotherapy, and the cyst was benign. She says her health battles have changed her perspective on life.
“I’ve learned not to judge people, because you never know what they’re going through. And always look at the positives – you have your bad days and your good days, but you just have to count on the good days to get you through.”
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