Becki thought she was just overeating, but that wasn’t the case at all (Picture: Becki Ward/SWNS)
Becki Ward had never felt comfortable with her weight so, like 1.6 million other adults in the UK, she began taking Mounjaro in October 2024.
‘At first it was working well, and supressing my appetite, but then I realised I wasn’t losing weight as fast as everybody else,’ the now 33-year-old trainee health practitioner explains.
‘Some people were losing half-a-stone a week, and I was only losing one or two pounds in the same amount of time.
‘I’ve always struggled with my weight, so I thought it must just be me.’
What Becki didn’t know at the time was that she had a 12kg cancerous tumour growing in her stomach, due to an extremely rare form of cancer only two UK hospitals are able to treat.
Pseudomyxoma peritonei (PMP) affects just 400 new patients per year in Britain, and typically begins as a small growth in your appendix, called a polyp, but it can also start in your bowel or ovaries (although this is even rarer).
Becki in hospital after surgery to remove her large tumour (Picture: Becki Ward/SWNS)
After a few months of blaming herself for the weight loss jabs not working, Becki began suffering with unpleasant new symptoms.
‘I assumed it wasn’t working because I’m in my 30s, I was lazy, or I was overeating,’ Becki, from Great Yarmouth, says.
‘Then I started to get night sweats and stomach pains. I’d read on the news about people getting pancreatitis from Mounjaro and I started panicking and thought that’s what I had.’
Mounjaro manufacturer Eli Lilly lists acute pancreatitis as an ‘uncommon’ side effect that may affect up to 1 in 100 people, increasing the detail in it’s information leaflet back on October 31, 2025.
Becki went to the doctors to get blood tests, and to check her organs, but she was shocked when tumour markers flagged up. Doctors initially thought Becki had ovarian cancer but carried out more tests to be sure.
Pseudomyxoma peritonei (PMP)
PMP usually grows slowly, but it can eventually spread into other parts of the tummy, and the peritoneum, which lines the abdomen.
These cancer cells make a mucus that collects in the abdomen as a jelly-like fluid called mucin. This has earned the cancer the nickname ‘jelly belly’.
PMP doesn’t spread to other parts of the body like other cancers, but it will spread inside the tummy.
This particular cancer is more common in women than men, and can be confused with ovarian cancer, which can also cause a swollen abdomen.
Symptoms of PMP are:
pain in your abdomen or pelvis
not being able to become pregnant
swelling and bloating in your abdomen
changes in bowel habits
hernia – this is a bulge in the tummy wall or groin
loss of appetite
feeling of fullness
The main treatments are surgery and chemotherapy.
Source: Cancer Research
They discovered a 22cm cyst on Becki’s left ovary, but doctors took five months to finally diagnose her with pseudomyxoma peritonei.
‘I was so shocked when I got the diagnosis, the thing I’ve always been most terrified of is getting cancer,’ she recalls. ‘I just wasn’t expecting it, and I immediately thought the worst.’
Doctors believed Becki may have had the cancer for five years, without knowing, due to how severe her symptoms were, so they booked her in for an eight hour surgery in August 2025.
Becki before having the 12kg tumour removed (Picture: Becki Ward / SWNS)
‘My stomach continued to grow, and days before the surgery, I looked like I was about to give birth to twins,’ she says. ‘By the time they removed the tumour, it was huge, it weighed 12kg.’
The surgery ended up taking 11 hours because the cancer had spread further than doctors initially realised. They removed all of the visible signs of cancer, taking out Becki’s spleen, appendix, gall bladder, omentum (a fold of fatty tissue in the abdomen), peritoneum (a protective layer inside the abdomen), and gave her a total hysterectomy.
‘I was plunged in to early menopause,’ Becki adds. ‘Doctors gave me HRT, which helped a lot, but it’s really hard to find any support or any information for women going through menopause at my age.’
Becki will never be able to have children, but thankfully, she and her husband Ed, 36, had already made the decision not to have kids before the diagnosis.
‘I can imagine it would be devastating for a lot of people though, as 33 is the age when so many people want to have a baby,’ she explains.
Becki’s surgery scar (Picture: Becki Ward / SWNS)
Immediately following the surgery, they circulated heated chemotherapy inside her abdomen to kill microscopic cancer cells that can’t be seen during the procedure.
After five days in intensive care, and a total of two weeks in hospital, Becki was sent home. She’s now slowly recovering, but despite struggling with her energy levels, and picking up heavy objects, she’s mostly doing okay.
Doctors believe Becki is cancer free, but she’ll have to go for regular checks at the doctors for the next 20 years, as the cancer has a 30% chance of recurring.
For now though, she’s in the clear.
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