Ashley's words about her diagnostic:

The date of November 14th will forever be a day a will never forget. 2 weeks before this date i went to a gastroenterologist appt; after finally getting in for over a year. I took me moving to Florida to finally be seen. I went in for a routine colonoscopy; thinking I just had ibs or something like that. For the last year I had have been having difficulty going to the bathroom properly. I would find blood in my stool. I couldn’t control my bowels. Whenever I would pass gas I would end up having an accident. I constantly had the feeling/urge of having to go to the bathroom but nothing would come. I was miserable; I knew something was wrong but just didn’t know what. Hence the need to go see a gastroenterologist. So on the 14th I went in for a routine colonoscopy to figure out what is wrong. During the procedure, which the couldn’t preform, they found a mass. The mass was so large the couldn’t get the scope pass. They took a biopsy; the results which they thought might be cancerous. On 15th the results came in, it was cancerous. All during this time I was dealing with the fact that I had bad fibroid in my uterus and they found a spot on my right breast that might be cancerous. The fibroids aren’t cancerous and the spot might just be scar tissue from my breast reduction; we are monitoring it. So it came to pass that I have rectum cancer, a disease that isn’t usually found until after you turn 50. Thank god I know how to listen to my body and knew there was something wrong; just didn’t know it was this extreme. Now we have to figure out what stage we are, and to do that we have to get a ct scan and an mri. The insurance denied the ct, and I had to fight to get it approved. So the cancer has spread to some lymph nodes near my uterus. We caught it early enough, so it’s stage 3 treatable and hasn’t spread anywhere but there. Thank god. On Thanksgiving I decided I needed to be closer to family and drove the 16 hours home to be with them. I only mention this because I know god hasn’t given me this disease to curl up and die; he gave it to me to use as a testimony. I’m going to beat this and still be me. Those that know know, y’all know I my spirit and attitude, and I plan on keeping it. Somedays are hard, and my mental health has definitely been affected but I’m just gonna keep on pushing on.

I love my support system, we got this!!!