When Anastasia Sevriukova first noticed blood in her stool at age 25, she didn’t tell anyone at first — not her then-boyfriend or her mom.
Her Google search narrowed the cause down to either colon cancer — which seemed extremely unlikely due to her 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 that didn’t work.
When the bleeding persisted for months, she saw a primary care physician in September 2024, who put her on a four-month waitlist to see a GI.
In the meantime, Sevriukova kept living her life in St. Louis, Missouri. She worked as an engineer for Boeing’s military branch. In her free time, she learned to watercolor and had one of her paintings displayed at a local exhibition.
Even at the end of 2024, when she was told that she’d be laid off from Boeing in mid-January 2025, things were looking up. Shortly after, Sevriukova, who is Ukrainian, was offered a position at a San Francisco startup developing drones to be used by Ukraine in the ongoing war — a dream job. Weeks later, she got engaged.
“The whole month was a rollercoaster,” she said. Between plans to start the new job, move to a new city, and eventually build 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 pretty much stop because I was very, very sick,” she said. “It was really difficult to accept that I need to take a break for now.”
She thought she was tired because of work
In the months leading up to her scheduled GI appointment in January 2025, Sevriukova frequently felt very fatigued. “I was like ‘I’m just tired from work, I have to do a lot,'” 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 one glass.
After her diagnosis, she learned that she had anemia, a common symptom of colon cancer. She had a hemoglobin level of 8 g/dL (a normal range for women is 12 to 15.5 g/dL).
A CT scan revealed her stage 4 colon cancer diagnosis, and explained her feeling drunk off one drink: It was a sign of her liver not functioning properly, because the cancer had spread to it.
Given her diagnosis, Sevriukova declined her job offer. The couple moved to Rochester, Minnesota, where Sevriukova’s mother lives. Upon seeing her new oncologist, she was put on an iron infusion before starting cancer treatment. She also underwent genetic testing and learned she had no predisposition for cancer, such as Lynch syndrome.
“It was a stroke of bad luck,” she said.
A breakneck decision about her future fertility
Sevriukova’s oncologist told her that she would most likely lose her ability to have kids after side effects from chemotherapy.
Because he wanted to start her treatment right away, he gave her two weeks to retrieve and freeze her eggs. Sevriukova was referred to the Mayo Clinic and decided to go through with the procedure.
“It was very physically and emotionally demanding,” Sevriukova said. “I was also trying to process at the same time, the fact that whatever eggs they can get, that’s all they got.” She had her egg extraction in March 2025. Two days later, she started chemotherapy and antibody therapy, which her doctors selected after a liver biopsy identified features of her tumor relevant to treatment.
By that point, she was exhausted from two weeks of hormone therapy to produce as many eggs as possible, plus the frequent bloodwork and ultrasound appointments during the monitoring phase. The egg retrieval itself was also painful and led to spotting by the time she began cancer treatment.
“Yet, I do not regret it at all,” Sevriukova said. “It was the best decision I’ve made.”
She took a break from both treatments in June 2025, when she was prepped for surgery on her colon and the installation of a hepatic artery infusion (HAI) pump, which channels chemotherapy medication directly into the liver.
There were complications with the surgery. She had a rare bowel leak because the incision in her colon was not sealed properly, leading to an infection in her abdomen. “That is probably the most pain I have experienced in my life,” she said, spending 20 days in the hospital. The resulting surgery left Sevriukova with scars and a stoma bag, a waste collection pouch outside of her abdomen.
“I could not 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 what it used to look like a year ago, and body image is a huge, huge aspect of a young woman’s life.”
She needed a liver transplant
From the beginning, Sevriukova had “too many tumors to count” on her liver. Even when her scans were clear, the tumors would quickly resurface the moment she stopped chemo. “I never know when the cancer decides to mutate and take over,” she said.
Sevriukova was eventually able to get a liver transplant in June 2026, which left her cancer-free for three months. Then, in August 2026, a CT scan revealed a few small tumors on her lungs. She will soon resume chemotherapy and antibody therapy.
Sevriukova has gradually adjusted to her new normal. She said that when she’s in treatment, her mom, sister, and fiancé take turns staying with her at the hospital and talking to doctors on her behalf.
The side effects of treatment have been so debilitating that Sevriukova can’t work — something she found devastating at the start of treatment. Instead, she’s taking a full semester of computer science courses from a local community college, with the aim of getting her master’s and advancing her career.
Still, she can never get fully used to the nausea and appetite loss right after each chemo treatment. “You just have to always roll with the punches,” she said. “Right now I’m a little more used to those punches than I was at the beginning, but it’s still really, really difficult.”
She said the experience changed her emotionally. It’s also made her realize how taboo colon cancer is, from talking about symptoms like rectal bleeding to living with a stoma bag.
“Even right now, it’s a little uncomfortable to say,” she said. “It’s so vulnerable and makes it so difficult to talk about it, to bring it up to friends, to family, but it has to be done.”
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