Woman diagnosed with colon cancer days after landing her dream job

When Anastasia Sevriukova first noticed blood in her stool at the age of 25, she didn’t tell anyone at first, neither her then-boyfriend nor her mother.

His Google search narrowed it down to colon cancer – which seemed extremely unlikely given the lack of family history – or hemorrhoids.

“I Googled ‘I had oysters. Did the shell cut my intestine?'” Sevriukova, now 27, told Business Insider. She tried hemorrhoid creams, but it didn’t work.

When the bleeding persisted for months, she saw a primary care doctor in September 2024, who put her on a four-month waiting list to see a gastroenterologist.

In the meantime, Sevriukova continued to live her life in St. Louis, Missouri. She worked as an engineer for the military branch of Boeing. In her free time, she learned to paint with watercolors and exhibited one of her paintings at a local exhibition.

Even in late 2024, when she was told she would be laid off at Boeing in mid-January 2025, things were looking up. Soon after, Sevriukova, who is Ukrainian, was offered a position at a San Francisco startup developing drones for use by Ukraine in the ongoing war — a dream job. A few weeks later, she got engaged.

“The whole month has been a roller coaster,” she said. Between plans to start a new job, move to a new city and possibly start a family with her now-fiancé, Sevriukova was excited about the future.

Then, four days after the engagement, she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer.

“Everything had to stop because I was very, very sick,” she said. “It was really hard to accept that I had to take a break at the moment.”

She thought she was tired from work

In the months leading up to her scheduled gastrointestinal appointment in January 2025, Sevriukova often felt very tired. “I was like, ‘I’m just tired from work, I have to do a lot of things,'” she said.

Then there was the date night a week before the doctor’s visit. She and her fiancé went to a wine and pizza bar. Suddenly Sevriukova felt drunk from just one drink.

After her diagnosis, she was diagnosed with anemia, a common symptom of colon cancer. Her hemoglobin level was 8 g/dL (a normal range for women is 12 to 15.5 g/dL).

A CT scan revealed his diagnosis of stage 4 colon cancer and explained his feeling of drunkenness after just one drink: it was a sign that his liver was not working properly, because the cancer had spread there.

Given After her diagnosis, Sevriukova declined her job offer. The couple moved to Rochester, Minnesota, where Sevriukova’s mother lives. After seeing her new oncologist, she received an iron infusion before starting cancer treatment. She also underwent genetic testing and learned that she had no predisposition to cancer, such as Lynch syndrome.

“It was a stroke of bad luck,” she said.

A dazzling decision regarding her future fertility

Sevriukova’s oncologist told her that she would most likely lose her ability to have children because of the side effects of chemotherapy.

As he wanted to start treatment immediately, he gave her two weeks to retrieve and freeze her eggs. Sevriukova was referred to the Mayo Clinic and decided to follow the procedure.

“It was very physically and emotionally demanding,” Sevriukova said. “I was also trying to understand at the same time the fact that whatever eggs they can get, that’s all they have.” She had her egg extraction at March 2025. Two days later, she began chemotherapy and antibody treatment, which her doctors selected after a liver biopsy identified features of her tumor relevant to treatment.

At this point, she was exhausted from two weeks of hormone treatment to produce as many eggs as possible, as well as the frequent appointments for blood tests and ultrasounds during the monitoring phase. The egg retrieval itself was also painful and led to microbleeds around the time she began her cancer treatment.

“Still, I don’t regret it at all,” Sevriukova said. “It was the best decision I made.”

She took a break from both treatments in June 2025, as she prepared for colon surgery and the installation of a hepatic artery infusion (HAI) pump, which delivers chemotherapy drugs directly to the liver.

There were complications with the operation. She had a rare leaky gut because the incision in her colon was improperly sealed, which led to an infection in his abdomen. “It’s probably the most intense pain I’ve felt in my life,” she said after spending 20 days in the hospital. The resulting operation left Sevriukova with scars and an ostomy bag, a waste collection pouch outside her abdomen.

“I couldn’t stop crying for days and the nurses didn’t even know what to do, how to console me,” she said. “My body doesn’t look like it did a year ago, and body image is a very important part of a young woman’s life.”

She needed a liver transplant

From the start, Sevriukova had “too many tumors to count” on her liver. Even when her scans were clear, the tumors quickly returned as soon as she stopped chemo. “I never know when the cancer decides to mutate and take over,” she said.

Sevriukova was finally able to receive a liver transplant in June 2026, which left her cancer-free for three months. Then, in August 2026, a scan revealed some small tumors on his lungs. She will soon resume chemotherapy and antibody treatment.

Sevriukova gradually adapted to her new normal. She explained that when she undergoes treatment, her mother, sister and fiancé take turns staying with her at the hospital and speaking to doctors on her behalf.

The side effects of the treatment have been so debilitating that Sevriukova can no longer work – something she found devastating at the start of treatment. Instead, she takes a full semester of computer science courses at a local community college, with the goal…