Sam Rae (Hawke, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Aged Care and Seniors) | Link to this | Hansard source

Some meetings change the way you see the world. This week I sat down with Melissa Dunmore, from Bacchus Marsh in our community, who travelled all the way to Canberra with Bowel Cancer Australia for their Call on Canberra advocacy event. Melissa wrote to me wanting to share her story, and I'm so glad she did because it's a story we all need to hear.

A week before her 33rd birthday, Melissa's life looked like that of any young mum. She was raising two children, just two and six years old, married to a local sparky and juggling work, study and family life the way so many of us do. Then everything changed. She was diagnosed with stage 3 bowel cancer.

In the lead-up to that diagnosis, her fatigue and anaemia were put down to women's health issues, a reflection of just how deeply the assumption runs that bowel cancer is an older person's disease and of just how hard women still have to fight to have their health taken seriously. As her condition worsened, she ended up in the resuscitation room at Sunshine Hospital, having lost a significant amount of blood. Even then, her age and lack of family history meant cancer simply wasn't on anyone's radar. She was placed on a waiting list for a colonoscopy. When the colonoscopy finally happened, Melissa woke up to four words that no 33-year-old person should have to hear: 'You have bowel cancer.'

What followed was surgery to remove her entire large colon, then six months of chemotherapy at the Melton Health Hub. For a while, the scans were clear, and Melissa began the hard work of learning to live, work and parent without a bowel. Then, 12 months later, the cancer came back. It had spread to her liver. At 35, Melissa now lives with a stage 4 diagnosis and is waiting on scan results that will shape whatever comes next for her and her family.

Sadly, Melissa is not alone in this. Fifteen thousand Australians are diagnosed with bowel cancer every year. One in eight Australians diagnosed with bowel cancer are under the age of 50, and those rates are increasing on a trajectory that looks like a mountain. It's the second-leading cause of cancer death in our country and the deadliest cancer for Australians aged 25 to 54, yet awareness of that fact still lags well behind the reality.

That gap between what we assume and what the data tells us is exactly what advocates like Melissa are working so hard to close. What strikes me most about Melissa's story is her insistence on being heard, on trusting what her body was telling her even when others didn't, and that's a lesson we should take notes from. Young people shouldn't just accept that they're too young to have bowel cancer as an explanation for their symptoms. If something feels wrong, advocate for yourself. Speak until you're taken seriously. Keep knocking on doors until you get the tests, the explanations and the treatments you need.

Melissa, your strength is extraordinary. The relentlessly practical way that you just get on with everything and the courage with which you use your experience to spread awareness for others says everything about who you are. Our community is proud of you, and I'll carry your story with me in this place.