Lexie Haglund: Beating stage IV CRC

As advances in colon cancer treatment progress, knowing your biomarkers can help doctors pinpoint your care journey. Just take it from Lexie Haglund, who has been cancer-free since November 2024.

It’s a story we’ve heard at the Colorectal Cancer Alliance many times: Hindsight is 20/20.

Lexie Haglund came home from work on a Monday feeling bloated. She and her husband were going to celebrate their wedding anniversary with a dinner out, but she rescheduled because she thought maybe she had eaten something earlier that didn’t agree with her. 

As the week progressed, she developed a sharp, shooting pain in her abdomen but passed it off as a bad case of gas. Her husband encouraged her to visit a doctor, but Lexie thought she would just be turned away at the height of the pandemic.  

By Friday, the pain was stopping Lexie in her tracks. As she prepared to go to urgent care, she put on structured pants rather than the stretchy pants she had been wearing and realized they wouldn’t button. 

“When I look back now, there were typical symptoms, but they weren’t consistent leading up to my diagnosis, so I just assumed it was what I ate,” Lexie said.

A CT scan initially showed what doctors thought was an air bubble in her colon. Yet after a week in the hospital, it was still there. Doctors put Lexie on antibiotics, which made her ill, and then told her to see a GI doctor, who ordered a colonoscopy. Lexie was 40 years old.

On the day of her colonoscopy, Lexie was told she had a tumor, and it was definitely cancer. Her tumor had grown outside her large intestine and began heading into her small intestine. 

Lexie’s colon resection was successful, and she completed four rounds of CapOX chemotherapy. Unfortunately, six months after finishing chemo, doctors found the cancer had metastasized in other places. She was diagnosed with stage IV colorectal cancer and underwent biomarker testing.

Her specific biomarker is G12C, an aggressive type of colon cancer. Knowing this biomarker helped Lexie’s doctor find a more effective treatment. Lexie spoke with her oncologist about joining clinical trials to treat G12C, but they instead decided to try FOLFIRI and add Avastin. 

Lexie’s doctor told her she would be a chemo patient for the rest of her life, and surgery was not possible. He said her goal was to make it to five years because a lot of research was being done on her specific gene, and he wanted to get her into clinical trials. She completed 36 rounds of chemotherapy.

“I started this in 2022 thinking that I was going to be on chemo every other week for life, but to my surprise, it stabilized my cancer, so I didn’t have growth,” Lexie said.

At the same time, Lexie was also doing ctDNA testing, which compared her bloodwork to her original tumor tissue to see if the tumor DNA was circulating through her system. Fortunately, her cancer had stabilized and there was no new progression. After several negative tests, her doctor started talking about surgery.

“The hardest thing about having my specific mutation is the odds are not good, but you have to think of the people out there who’ve beat the odds,” she said. “If you’re going through something like this, you have to believe that no matter what, you can beat the odds.” 

In May 2024, Lexie underwent HIPEC surgery which is used for peritoneal metastasis in the abdomen. During this surgery, doctors remove tumors and flood heated chemotherapy drugs inside the abdomen to eliminate leftover cancerous cells. 

“It’s a big surgery,” Lexie said. “I was in the hospital for eight days, and it was a horrible recovery. But, it was successful, resulting in my negative PET scan in November.”

Throughout everything, Lexie found hope and shared her experience in several online forums. 

“It’s been such a huge learning curve to go from being completely healthy to being a patient where you have to rely on other people for lots of things,” Lexie said. “I was shocked by how many people have colon cancer. It’s becoming more prevalent among young people. I found out people close to my family had it, and I didn’t even know.” 

She continued, “I am realizing how many people are touched by this and we need to really get the word out about getting screened and advocating for more research about it.”

Even though her recent scans are clear, Lexie is still receiving palliative chemotherapy. She recognizes this will always be a big part of her life. 

“At the point where I went from stage II to stage IV, I had to change my thinking about cancer being something I was going to beat to shifting into a mindset of living with cancer,” she said. “Even now, as I am cancer-free, I still feel like I'm a stage IV patient. I’m still in treatment. I’ll always be doing these scans and screenings, and it’s just always going to be a part of my life. It’s become a part of who I am. The day I was diagnosed, I was a cancer survivor. As long as I am still here, I am surviving.”

This patient story was developed with support from our partner: