KELLIE FINLAYSON: 'My husband made a joke while we were on a road trip. It saved my life.'

This is an extract from There Must Be More by Kellie Finlayson and Alley Pascoe.

'Please pull over, Jezz,' I begged. 'I'm going to shit myself.' There are five petrol stations on the 40-minute drive from Adelaide to the lolly shop in Hahndorf, in the Adelaide Hills.

I know because we stopped at all of them, me urgently needing to go to the bathroom.

Watch: Ellie Wilcock wants others to be aware of the signs and symptoms of bowel cancer after what she thought was a UTI was diagnosed as the deadly disease.

At the first petrol station, I grabbed a bottle of water, an apple, and a doughnut with sprinkles in a plastic wrapper.

And I made sure I went to the toilet. It was early on a Sunday morning, and I'd just breastfed Sophia, who was almost three months old, in the hope that she'd sleep in the car on the drive.

'Alright, are you good to go?' Jeremy asked me.

'Yep, I think so,' I said, running through the road-trip checklist: fuel, snacks, toilet. Coffee. We needed coffee!

It was in the queue at the drive-through coffee place that I realised I needed to go to the bathroom again. Urgently.

I thought I'd finished my business at the first stop, but I obviously had more to do.

I made Jeremy drive around to the next window so I could ask to use the bathroom inside.

'It's a drive-through, babe. They won't have a toilet here,' said Jezz, shaking his head ever so slightly as I leaned over him to speak to the woman in the window.

'We don't normally let customers use the staff bathroom,' the cashier said hesitantly.

'Please, I really need to go. I've just had a baby.' I nodded to Sophia in her car seat in the back. The cashier took pity on me and my pelvic floor, and let me in for a wee. I didn't need a wee, though; I desperately needed to do a poo. But when I sat on the toilet, nothing came out. Not even a fart.

I had the urge to go, but I couldn't. I sat there for a few more minutes before giving up and going back to the car.

'Did you go?' Jeremy asked me as I jumped in the passenger seat.

'Yep,' I lied, not wanting him to think we'd stopped for no reason.

By the third bathroom stop on our drive to the countryside, Jeremy was understandably getting annoyed. I'd just been to the bathroom twice in fifteen minutes, and I needed to go again.

'Fuck's sake,' Jezz said, pulling into another petrol station.

'We need to hire a portaloo! We're pulling over every fifty metres, and it's not even because of the baby.'

I didn't clap back at him because I was busy clenching my bum and rushing inside. I pushed open the cubicle door, shimmied down my pants and sat on the toilet seat. There was a tiny splash. All that for that.

'That's it, we're getting a portaloo.' Jezz repeated his joke when I got back to the car.

'It's not funny! Don't joke about it. There's clearly something wrong. I'm postpartum. Something's going on.'

'Yeah, I get that. You need to see a doctor Kell,' Jeremy insisted. 'You need to do something about it. It's not just affecting your life, it's affecting our life.'

'Oh yeah, because pulling over every now and then is so hard,' I said defensively.

But Jeremy was right and I knew it. There was something wrong, and I needed to do something about it. I picked up my phone and googled 'bulk-billing doctors near me'. I moved the map to our suburb in Adelaide, found a GP clinic and booked the next available appointment.

On the online form, I explained that I was having bowel issues and wanted to see a doctor. The appointment was scheduled for three days later. It took less than five minutes to set up, and when we eventually pulled up in Hahndorf after our highway servo tour I thought nothing more of it.

At the lolly shop, I bought all my favourites: white chocolate–coated raspberry liquorice, FruChocs and white chocolate freckles. Jeremy got a giant chocolate frog.

It all happened so fast.

After I booked my GP appointment during our trip to the Hahndorf lolly shop, someone at the clinic rang me and said they'd brought the appointment forward. I was due to take baby Sophia to her twelve-week check-up, so they organised to do that at the same time as seeing me.

I walked into the clinic expecting to weigh my baby, talk some s**t (literally) and leave with a jar for a stool sample.

I was relieved to find I'd been booked in to see a female doctor, probably because I was postpartum.

'Okay, tell me. What's going on?' the doctor asked me when I sat down with Sophia in my arms.

'It's actually my bowels,' I revealed.

We ran through the list of usual suspects.

'I'm not gluten or lactose intolerant, so I thought that I might have IBS? Just because of the inflammation and the blood in my stool.'

The doctor's face changed.

'You've had what in your stool?' she asked.

'Blood,' I repeated. 'Not regularly, just a once-off every now and then.'

'When was the first time you had it?'

'At the start of 2020.'

'So, nearly two years ago?' The doctor was clearly not impressed. For the first time, I got a sense that things might be more serious than I thought. The doctor wrote me a referral for a specialist, and I was booked in for an appointment with them in a couple of weeks.

The next day the phone rang. 'I've got an opening this afternoon at 4 p.m.,' the specialist told me. 'Can you make it?'

I jumped at the early appointment, figuring that the GP I'd seen had put in a good word for me. It pays to know people in high places, I thought to myself. When I met the specialist, he organised for me to have a colonoscopy the next day.

Again, I thought I'd lucked out.

I started the bowel prep — taking laxatives to clear the bowels and electrolytes to prevent dehydration — right away.

The timing wasn't ideal. Jeremy was working — doing a promo event at Adelaide Oval — so I was bowel prepping and parenting on my own. I couldn't breastfeed Sophia because I was taking laxatives, so I was giving her formula for the first time.

The doctor had warned me: once you drink the laxatives, you'll be glued to the toilet. After I downed the first litre, nothing happened. I should've known then. But I didn't, so I drank another litre. I was so full that the liquid started coming back up. I spewed the bowel prep up, not realising that it was because it couldn't get out the other end.

Something was in the way.

I was in the foetal position in the shower, spewing and doing tiny squirts of poo. Baby Sophia fell asleep on the bath mat outside the shower. I felt like the worst mother. 'I'm so sorry, baby,' I whispered to my sleeping daughter.

'Please come home,' I begged Jeremy, after finally relenting and calling him. When he did, Sophia was still asleep on the bathroom floor, and I was in tears because I couldn't keep the second litre of laxatives down.

I called the specialist's office to tell them, and they told me not to worry, that the first litre usually did the trick. I didn't know how to explain that next to nothing had come out of my bowels. And I didn't want to, in case they made me go through the entire process again.

The next afternoon, my colonoscopy was delayed by three hours. I was starving because I hadn't eaten and had spewed everything inside me out. I felt empty in every sense.

When the procedure finally happened, it lasted ten seconds.

I woke up from the anaesthetic, saw the clock and looked at the nurses. 'That didn't take long,' I said to them.

'No, dear, it doesn't take long,' they said. It was reassuring.

It shouldn't have been.

The reason it was so quick was because the doctor couldn't physically perform the colonoscopy. My tumour was so big, it was blocking the way.

I was a bit out of it after the anaesthesia, but I remember thinking how lovely everyone was being to me. The nurses were so kind and helpful. When I got dressed and walked to the reception area, Jeremy was sitting with Sophia, waiting for me. I wasn't expecting them to be there; the hospital's Covid restrictions were tight.

I assumed they made an exception for us because I was the last patient of the day and we had a little baby. That's so sweet of them, I thought to myself, groggily.

We were ushered into the gastroenterologist's office. The doctor was looking at a piece of paper. He turned it around to show us. 'This is what bowel cancer looks like,' he said.

He was holding a photo of my bowel.

I went completely blank. I didn't understand. 'What do you mean?' I asked.

Listen: To learn more, this episode of Mamamia's podcast The Quicky hears from survivors, specialists and advocates about why diagnoses like Kellie's are becoming more common — and what needs to change. Post continues below.

Jeremy had his own questions. 'What the f**k is happening?' he said, as he passed Sophia to a nurse to hold. He was in shock.

'You have bowel cancer. I'm sorry, I don't know what else to say,' the doctor replied.

I have bowel cancer.

'I've already messaged a surgeon at a private hospital,' the doctor continued. 'He will see you tomorrow at four-fifteen p.m.'

I need surgery.

'We'll talk again. You need some time to process this,' the doctor added.

F**k.

I got up and left the room. I still had a cannula in my arm.

When the nurse tried to tell me she had to take it out before I left, I kept walking. 'Please, don't,' I said.

I was rattled. And I was angry. I didn't want to be touched.

I wanted to go home. I was hungry. I wanted to get something to eat. More than anything, I wanted to rewind the last few hours and go back to before. Before I had cancer. Before I needed surgery.

Before.

'I'm just really not in the mood to be here,' I told the nurse, who was trying to reason with me about the cannula.

I was being such a brat, but I wasn't functioning normally.

After some wrangling, they finally got the cannula out of me and I was free to leave the hospital. I walked to our car and buckled Sophia into her car seat in a daze. I sat next to her in the back seat and held her hand. She was so tiny. Her little fingers curled around my thumb.

Jeremy did the only thing he could think of.

He called my mum.

'I don't know how to tell you this, but Kellie has cancer,' he said.

I heard the words he said, but I didn't understand them.

In the background of the call, I was howling with tears. The noises I was making were primal; animalistic. And terrifying. I sobbed until the tears stopped coming, until I realised crying wasn't going to solve anything, and something else took over.

Shock. A complete overwhelm.

Nothing made sense, no emotion felt like the right one.

Image: Supplied.

There Must Be More by Kellie Finlayson with Alley Pascoe, published by Allen & Unwin, is available now.

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Feature: Supplied.