It all started with stomach issues that wouldn’t go away and ended with a diagnosis Kerry Jones Uher never expected.

Cancer.

The 40-year-old, mother of three from Lansford knew something was off last spring when she just didn’t feel good.

“I just wasn’t feeling myself,” Jones Uher said. “I am not a great sleeper but I was really tired and I just had chronic stomach issues. I felt like I always had to go to the bathroom or that I just had a stomachache all the time. Food wasn’t appealing. I really wasn’t eating much.

“... Occasionally I passed blood. So of course, I’m looking stuff up and I’m like here are all the things that this could be. But it can’t be cancer.”

At first she thought it was stress, paired with caring for three young children and preparing for the upcoming school year at Penn-Kidder Elementary, where she serves as an eighth grade teacher.

But then, something inside of her whispered that something just wasn’t right.

“It kind of took the kids saying, ‘Mommy is in the bathroom again’ to make me realize just how long of a time I was in the bathroom during the day.”

She called and set up an appointment with her family doctor, who recommended seeing a gastroenterologist.

Three months later, the gastroenterologist began a full work-up, complete with a colonoscopy.

“I was shocked,” Jones Uher said. “You think you’re too young for it but now the doctors are all like ‘45 plus’ (to get a colonoscopy) and I’m like it should be 40-plus because the amount of young people under 50 that are getting diagnosed with this is staggering. Literally over the last two years, studies and statistics have changed exponentially and they can’t quite figure out why. It’s scary.”

On Aug. 18, Jones Uher underwent her colonoscopy.

“Literally 12 minutes later, they woke me up and brought my dad into the recovery room,” she said, adding that it was then that the doctor told her they had found an adenocarcinoma of the colon - a sizable tumor - that had been probably growing for years due to its size.

Over the next few days, the doctor armed Jones Uher with a group of medical professionals who came up with a plan for her surgery.

“I didn’t even know how to react,” she said. “You never really know what you would do and where you go from there when you get a diagnosis like this.”

Now, all the pieces of the puzzle that she had in the months leading up to this all began to fit together.

But the question nagging her now was how was she going to tell her children, who range in age from 6 to 11, while also trying to wrap her mind around all the questions she had regarding what the next steps would be.

As Jones Uher and her family began processing the news, she realized how large of a support system she had within her family, friends and the community in which she grew up.

She thanks this support for helping her and her children get through the last few months, from meal trains to phone calls to people making care packages for her kids.

“The outpouring of support was unbelievable and not just from the people you would expect, like your family and co-workers, but I mean everybody was absolutely amazing.”

In September, Jones Uher underwent surgery to remove the “bad pipes” as her son, John, called them.

Her medical team, which consisted not only of oncology and gastroenterology, but also a surgeon, urologist and more, removed the portion of cancerous colon as well as several lymph nodes using a hand-assisted robotic surgery.

She stayed in the hospital for four days before being discharged.

“When I came home, it was a really hard transition,” Jones Uher admitted, again crediting her friends and community members for coming over to check her vitals and make sure she was recovering well.

“But I underestimated how difficult it was going to be,” she said, adding that after three C-sections, she thought the recovery wouldn’t be as bad. “Everybody’s healing is different and I like to research so everything I was researching was saying ‘you should be able to do this at this point or that at this point’ and my doctor was saying ‘you should be here at this point’ and I wasn’t. It was like the first time I think I really felt defeated and that I was sick. ... It was really upsetting when you’re not where you want to be. ... It’s a mental game and an emotional game as much as a physical game.”

She admits that she is not yet back to where she was before her diagnosis, but has pushed forward and is working on her new self.

Jones Uher’s official diagnosis came back as stage 2b colorectal cancer, which means that while the cancer had permeated through the wall of the colon, it had not spread to any other organs.

She did not require chemotherapy and is resuming her normal life.

“I was very lucky and I was also very lucky that my oncologist was pretty proactive,” she said, noting that she has been doing blood testing every three months since that tests your molecular DNA to make sure no cancer antigens are present.

“It’s amazing,” Jones Uher said. “It was originally for breast cancer tests but breast cancer and colon cancer have a lot of similar facets so they’re using it for colon cancer patients as well. My oncologist said that if this was a few years go, I wouldn’t have been doing this but ‘we have this now so we’re going to use this technology.”

Last month, Jones Uher made it her mission to bring awareness to Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, and shared facts and experiences on her social media platform.

She said that throughout this journey, she has heard from so many younger people who have thanked her for talking about her experience because they were being proactive and calling their doctor for a checkup just to be safe.

“People need to normalize these conversations because yes it’s like who wants to talk about poop but you’ve got to talk about it,” Jones Uher said. “If we’re not talking about, it’s stigmatized. It’s killing people. So we’ve got to do something about it and talking about the functions of our bodies, that’s what we have to do.”