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At 25, Anastasia Sevriukova asked Google a strange question: “I had oysters. Did the shell cut my intestine?” The engineer, 27 today, recalled the search to Business Insider. She was hunting for any harmless reason behind the blood she kept noticing, and she had told no one about it, including her boyfriend and her mother. Her searching left two explanations standing. One was common and annoying. The other was frightening, though nothing in her family history pointed that way.
Hemorrhoid creams made no difference. When the bleeding continued for months, Sevriukova visited her regular doctor in September 2024, and the referral to a gastroenterologist came with a four-month waitlist. She returned to her routine in St. Louis, Missouri, while exhaustion piled up in the background. She chalked it up to job stress and kept going.
Sevriukova worked as an aerospace engineer on the defense side of Boeing and spent her free time learning watercolor, good enough to land one painting in a local exhibition. A layoff notice arrived late in 2024, effective mid-January 2025. A San Francisco startup building drones for Ukraine’s war effort quickly offered her a job. Sevriukova is Ukrainian, and it was a dream job. Within weeks, she was also engaged.
One Glass of Wine Left Her Feeling Drunk a Week Before Her Specialist Visit
“The whole month was a rollercoaster,” Sevriukova said. A new job, a move to another city, and a family with her partner all sat on the horizon. About a week before her long-awaited specialist visit, the couple stopped at a pizza place with a wine list, and a single glass left her feeling drunk. Her fatigue was already a mystery. Now her body had delivered a second one.
Just four days after she said yes, the answer came: stage 4 colon cancer. A CT scan also solved the wine mystery. The tumor had reached her liver, and the organ had stopped working properly, which is why one drink hit her so hard. “Everything had to pretty much stop,” Sevriukova said. Pausing her life was hard to accept, and the job she had just won would be the first thing she gave up.
The fatigue had a cause too. Doctors found anemia, with hemoglobin at 8 g/dL, far under the 12 to 15.5 range typical for women. Her story reflects a national trend: the American Cancer Society’s 2026 report shows colorectal cancer is now the leading cause of cancer death in adults under 50, and roughly three in four cases in that age group are found at an advanced stage. Her oncologist wanted treatment to begin right away.
Two Weeks to Save Her Eggs, Then a Surgery That Put Her in the Hospital for 20 Days
Sevriukova turned down the San Francisco job and relocated to Rochester, Minnesota, her mother’s city. Her new oncologist started with an iron infusion, and genetic testing found no inherited risk such as Lynch syndrome. “It was a stroke of bad luck,” she said. A harder conversation followed. Chemotherapy would most likely end her ability to have children, and the doctor wanted treatment underway fast, so he gave her a two-week window to freeze her eggs.
The Mayo Clinic took her case, and Sevriukova went ahead. Two weeks of hormone injections, constant bloodwork, and ultrasounds led up to a painful retrieval in March 2025. She was processing a sobering fact at the same time: whatever number of eggs doctors collected would be all she would ever have. She has no regrets and calls it the best decision of her life. Chemotherapy and antibody therapy began just two days afterward, while she was still worn out and spotting.
In June 2025, she paused both treatments for colon surgery and a hepatic artery pump, a device that sends chemotherapy straight into the liver. A rare complication followed. A poorly sealed incision leaked, an abdominal infection set in, and she spent 20 days hospitalized in the worst pain of her life. She woke up with surgical scars and an external pouch for waste. She cried for days, and her body no longer looked the way it had a year earlier.
A Liver With “Too Many Tumors to Count” Led to a Transplant in June 2026
From the start, her liver held “too many tumors to count.” Even when scans came back clear, the cancer resurfaced shortly after chemotherapy stopped, and Sevriukova says she never knew when it might mutate and take over. A European randomized trial called TRANSMET found that carefully selected patients with inoperable colorectal tumors confined to the liver had a 73% five-year survival rate with a transplant plus chemotherapy, versus 9% with chemotherapy alone. Sevriukova received a new liver in June 2026.
The new liver kept her cancer-free for about three months. Then an August 2026 scan found a few small tumors in her lungs, and she expects to restart chemotherapy and antibody therapy soon. Her mother, sister, and fiancé rotate hospital stays and speak with doctors for her. Side effects keep her from working, so she is taking computer science classes toward a master’s degree. Post-chemo nausea still hits hard, but she says she is learning to “roll with the punches.”
Sevriukova says the experience showed her how taboo colon cancer still is, from discussing rectal bleeding to coping with an ostomy pouch. Even now, she said, speaking about it is “a little uncomfortable,” yet “it has to be done.” American Cancer Society guidelines call for routine screening to begin at 45. Sevriukova’s first symptom appeared at 25, and the first place she took it was a search bar.