A WOMAN could spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair after a series of doctors failed to diagnose her with bowel cancer.

Ruth McDonagh first complained of bleeding and abdominal pain in December 2008, but her fears of having cancer were laughed off by her local GP.

She saw doctors 14 times, at first in Potters Bar and then, after moving house, at Freezywater Primary Care Centre. But each time, she was sent away either with a cocktail of laxatives or instructions to cut out certain foods.

However, more than two years later Ms McDonagh was finally sent for hospital tests and learnt she has an advanced case of bowel cancer.

She said: “I'm disgusted. Part of me is really angry at what they have done. If I could get hold of those doctors, I would wring their necks because my son might lose his mother.

"To diagnose this would have been so simple. I was going to the doctors and pleading with them but they just dismissed it.

"But when you are trying to cope with something like this, you have to focus on the positive stuff."

The 46-year-old single mother, of Forest Road, said she spent many evenings doubled over in pain on the sofa before she was properly diagnosed, and had cut out so many foods on doctors' orders that her health had plummeted to dangerous levels.

Once diagnosed, she was presented with the heartbreaking decision to remove the tumour, which has grown into the bone, meaning removing a part of her spine, her bowels and bladder, and consigning her to a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

She said: "I would never walk again, lose the use of my legs, never be able to have sex again.

"When I first got this, the cancer would have been 90 per cent curable. But that was taken away from me. Everybody around me, when I tell them, say they can't believe these people left me the way they did."

After months on agonising chemotherapy treatment, surgeons at Chase Farm Hospital tried to remove the tumour in August last year. But Ms McDonagh woke to be told the operation had failed and she may have to have more chemotherapy. Even then, they could not guarantee it would work.

She turned to a specialist in America, and her friend rallied round to start raising up £100,000 for her to have the treatment she needs. At the end of last year, she learned there may be a surgeon in Yorkshire who can help, and she is now waiting for the NHS to decide what to do next.

Since being diagnosed on her son's tenth birthday, Ms McDonagh has strived to raise awareness of her case, of the signs of bowel cancer and to remove some of the stigmas around the disease such as having a colostomy bag.

She said: "I want other people to not take no for an answer. I am not the only person being misdiagnosed – there are lots of people out there who are in the same position."

She has had leafets made up about bowel cancer which are now handed to newly diagnosed patients at Chase Farm.

NHS North Central London and the hospital expressed their sympathies, but said they had not been contacted by Ms McDonagh about her case and "it is therefore difficult to give any further information at this stage".

But the hospital promised an investigation into "whether any breakdown in communication between ourselves and the GPs could have contributed to these events".

Ms McDonagh's friends have set up a website – at www.helpruthie.co.uk – about her plight and detail some of the current fundraising efforts to get her the right treatment.