Katie Davis lived the typical busy college student life when she first started feeling stomach pain.
Then a 20-year-old junior and marketing major at Westchester University in Pennsylvania, Davis split her time between classes, her job at Playa Bowls, and her sorority. The pain in the top right of her abdomen was easy to ignore because it was so sporadic and fleeting.
“It was on and off, it would come in waves,” Davis, now 21, told Business Insider. “I would go a good while without it, and then it would come and only last a few minutes, sometimes even a few seconds.”
Over time, the pain — when it showed up — got more severe, sometimes causing her to double over in pain. Three months after it started, she went to a local urgent care while at her boyfriend’s family beach house. There was no ultrasound equipment at the facility, and she was told that, based on her symptoms, it could be an ovarian cyst that would hopefully go away after her next period.
Her doctor suspected colon cancer before the biopsy
Davis was told to keep an eye on the pain and go to an emergency room if she felt other symptoms like fever or nausea. A few days later, when she started getting chills and vomited at her parents’ home, Davis did just that.
“That was the first time anything more serious than an ovarian cyst was brought up to me,” Davis said. According to her ultrasound and CAT scan, her colon was inflamed and appeared to have free fluid, a potential indication of infection, trauma, or cancer.
The ER doctor thought it could be Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, or, in more serious cases, colon cancer. He scheduled a colonoscopy.
“I didn’t think I was going to come out of it having cancer or anything really serious,” Davis said. Her first clue that something was wrong was when she woke up from the procedure. She noticed she was placed in a separate room from the other colonoscopy patients.
The doctor who performed the procedure told Davis and her mom that he was “pretty positive” the mass in Davis’ colon was cancerous. “He said he’d been doing it for long enough that he could kind of tell,” she said.
Shortly after, Davis was diagnosed with stage 2 colon cancer.
“I didn’t really know what to think or feel,” Davis said about learning her diagnosis. “Definitely just numb and confused at first, like ‘how did I get this?'”
Treatment dragged on due to side effects like vision loss
After diagnosis, Davis had surgery on her colon and was supposed to start three months of chemotherapy soon after. But, the side effects complicated her treatment.
“I couldn’t tolerate the more hardcore chemotherapy,” Davis said. She developed extreme fatigue, nausea, and neuropathy, which she said felt like “pins and needles” in her hands every time she encountered temperature changes.
The most alarming side effect was her vision loss. “My vision would go completely black,” Davis said. Her parents researched the drug, oxaliplatin, which can cause vision issues in some patients. Davis also found the Colorectal Cancer Alliance (CCA) and said hearing similar stories around common side effects helped her stay informed about alternative treatment options.
Davis was put on oral-only chemotherapy medication, prolonging her treatment from three to six months. The only upside was that she no longer had to travel back and forth for treatment, since she could take it wherever she was.
All the while, she was still attending her college classes in person as often as she could, even though her professors knew about her colon cancer diagnosis. “My boyfriend lives there, all my friends live there, so I tried to be there as much as possible,” she said. “I tried to keep up with my stuff as much as I could, but it definitely was difficult to do schoolwork when I felt as horrible as I did on the chemo.”
She’s glad she listened to her body
Davis finished chemo in June 2025 and was declared cancer-free shortly after. Going forward, she’ll have blood tests every three months and an annual colonoscopy.
Now a senior, she’s a marketing intern at a financial advisory firm and is trying to figure out her plans post-graduation. She said finishing treatment made her feel “excited to be normal again” and get back to her normal college life without worrying about doctor’s appointments or treatment side effects.
Looking back, she’s grateful for noticing the warning signs early enough. “A lot of my doctors said that most people at my age or with my stage wouldn’t really have the symptoms that I had that let me know that something is wrong,” she said. “I’m glad that I learned to listen to my body.”
It’s her biggest piece of advice to young people with similar or subtle symptoms, as colon cancer recently became the leading cause of cancer death in people under 50. She said joining the CCA and colon cancer Facebook groups can also help raise awareness of potential symptoms.
“You’re not really alone going through it,” she said, whether you’re worried about symptoms or actively undergoing treatment. “There are other people who are experiencing it too who can help you.”
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