In mid-May this year, beauty business owner Emma Eyles was a horse-riding, partyloving solo mum on a mission to sort her ongoing gut and back pain. By the end of the month, she was having palliative care at a hospice in Christchurch, terminally ill and preparing to die.
After eight months of going back and forth to doctors with chronic pain, Emma called herself an ambulance and was taken to Christchurch Hospital, where she was finally given a colonoscopy. It found stage four bowel