Horror as mum, 26, suffering from 'viral bug' told she was '12 hours from death'

A vomiting nursery worker claims doctors thought she'd caught a sickness bug from snotty kids - but it turned out she was only '12 hours from death'. Chloe Wakelin, 26, says she visited her GP weekly for two months to complain of persistent tummy ache, tiredness and low appetite.

The mum-of-one, from Littleborough in Rochdale, was reportedly told it was 'probably just a viral stomach bug' after tests for Crohn's disease and Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) came back negative. She assumed she'd picked up the illness while caring for children at work or looking after her daughter Harper-Ellen Wakelin, six.

In January 2024, she rushed to A&E because her skin was 'turning yellow', and scans revealed she had a large mass in her colon that required immediate surgery. Chloe says doctors told her she was just 12 hours from death because her liver and kidneys were failing.

When she woke from her seven-and-a-half-hour-long surgery she had a stoma bag and medics confirmed she had stage three colon cancer. Chloe said she felt 'everything had crumbled around her' when she got the news but is now thankfully in remission after four rounds of gruelling chemotherapy.

Chloe said: "I was told that I probably just had a viral stomach bug. I was working in a nursery and I was around children all the time so I just thought that if it was a stomach bug, I'd picked it up from the children.

"I have a little girl myself so maybe she'd brought it home from school. As time went on, I knew that the stomach bug wasn't going away and that it had to be something else.

"It was getting to the stage where I started to question if it was all in my head. When you're going continuously [to the doctors] but you're told there's nothing wrong with you, it gets