A teacher diagnosed with colon cancer at 36 had only 1 noticeable symptom [Video]

It was June 2020, and Stefania Frost’s family had just gotten together at a barbecue for the first time since the pandemic started. But the next day, Frost, a second-grade teacher in Waltham, Massachusetts, noticed a pain in her right side.

“I thought it was something that I ate or some kind of stomach bug going around,” Frost, 40, tells TODAY.com. About a week later, however, the pain hadn’t gone away, so she made a doctor’s appointment.

Thinking the pain could be a sign of appendicitis, Frost’s doctor sent her for imaging, which revealed inflammation around her colon. Frost was put on a round of antibiotics but her doctor also sent her for a colonoscopy. The pain subsided over the next few days, but Frost still went for the colonoscopy the next week — and received shocking results.

“Afterward, the doctor talked to me,” she recalls. “I’m just waking up, and they said there was a tumor in the …