'I was given 24 hours to live': BBC Make a Difference Award for Chorley hairdresser

Since she was a young girl, Victoria Danson had always wanted to be a hairdresser.

As a teenager in Clayton-Le-Woods, she worked for less than £80 a week as a Saturday girl at her local salon, and had jumped at the chance to do an apprenticeship as soon as she could.

While hairdressing full-time, she had also worked as a waitress on the side, and still made sure she had time to socialise on the weekends.

So at 17 years old, when she began to have diarrhoea more than 15 times a day, she had thought it was a consequence of burning the candle at both ends.

“It was really difficult,” Victoria told the Lancashire Evening Post. “I started getting symptoms when I was doing my hairdressing apprenticeship, and obviously hairdressing is very physical.

“I started with a lot of diarrhoea, then I had blood and mucus. But it’s not the sort of thing you really want to talk about, especially when you’re young, so I just ignored it and hoped it would go away. It didn’t.

“It got to the point where it was just taking over my life. I was really struggling to maintain my career because I was on the toilet all the time, and also just with the anxiety that it caused.

“I got quite depressed. I was really anxious. Wherever I went, I was constantly looking for the toilet. It started to ruin my life.”

For 18 months, doctors had thought she had been struggling with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and had put her on medication which failed to help her symptoms.

But it wouldn’t be until she was 19 years old that she received the correct diagnosis of Crohn’s disease.

Crohn’s disease is an incurable inflammatory bowel disease, which can often lead to pain, fatigue, and weight loss - sometimes to a life-threatening degree.

It’s most common in people below the age of 30 who have a family history of the disease.

Many of the symptoms caused by Crohn’s can be eased with medication and lifestyle changes.

However, in severe cases, patients may undergo surgery to remove damaged pieces of the gut to either be reattached, or rerouted through a stoma.

”I finally got diagnosed because I went back to the doctors and I put the pressure on,” Victoria said.

“I was saying, ‘There’s no way this is IBS. It’s waking me in the night, the pain is horrendous. It’s ruining my life’.”

In an effort to keep her illness under control, Victoria spent five years on strong medication and steroids, and even quit hairdressing altogether as her symptoms remained difficult to manage - a decision she described as “heartbreaking”.

But when her health took a sudden turn, she was rushed into emergency surgery at 24 years old, where doctors removed 18 inches of her bowel and an abscess which had turned septic.

“I was given 24 hours to live,” Victoria said. “They didn’t know that I had sepsis, they didn’t know what was going on inside when I had the emergency surgery. They just knew something was really, really wrong.

“My surgeon was an absolute hero. He came and took my hand, and he said, ‘I don’t actually know how you managed to live. If we’d have left it for another 24 hours, you wouldn’t have made it’.

“My surgery was the turning point. It was very difficult mentally, because of the body image aspect - I think there’s a lot of pressure on women, and to have something different about myself was quite difficult. It filled me with a bit of fear.

“I told the nurses that I was really struggling, and they said they’d get two girls to come and see me who had had the same surgery, and were further down the line.

“Oh my God, it changed my life. They were working. They’d had children. They looked well. And I just thought, ‘How many people have been in this situation, where they’ve had life-changing surgery and had no one to speak to?’.”

It was when she got home from hospital that Victoria realised just how little support those living with bowel diseases received in Lancashire - and how much of a difference a visit from someone else could make.

While at home recovering, she reached out to a national Crohn’s disease charity to offer to set up a Lancashire branch, but was declined as the charity didn’t have enough funding.

So as a result, she thought she’d take it upon herself.

“At the Crohn’s and Colitis Support Group Lancashire, we do monthly meetings at Euxton Community Centre. We do wellness retreats, and we focus on getting people active by doing walks. We really focus on wellbeing and bringing people together to reduce isolation while living with chronic illness.

“[At the start], I really thought that loads of people would attend the group,” Victoria said. “And literally two people turned up! But it really gave us a chance to open up about what we’d been going through.

“Along the way we’ve helped spread the word. The NHS massively backs what we’re doing it, and I’d love to open a holistic house one day, and offer social prescribing. It’s the funding that we need to get.”

Over the past nine years, Victoria has provided a lifeline to dozens of people across Lancashire who were in search of people to talk to - and has even gone as far as educating the next generation of doctors at the University of Lancashire.

“I share my story through presentations: obviously I have pictures and things, or I’ll have a video of me on my grandma’s stairlift right through to solo travelling around Bali, just to show people that there is life after going through severe adversity.

“I love the fact I’m training the next generation of professionals, because quite often when I’ve been a patient myself in hospital, the student might not have seen someone with a stoma bag or with Crohn’s. It’s embarrassing for them, and it’s embarrassing for you. I really emphasise the bedside manner - that’s really important.”

Since starting Crohn’s and Colitis Support Lancashire, Victoria has won the 2023 Health and Wellbeing Award for Chorley, and was this year named the winner of the Active Inspiration Award at Proud Preston 2026.

But as of this week, Victoria will be clearing room for a new trophy on her shelf - this time for the BBC’s Make a Difference Volunteering Award.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “I received an email saying that out of the 1,200 nominations, I’d been whittled down to the final four of the Volunteer Award. That in itself was an amazing achievement!

“I was so honoured to be given it, and so honoured to be recognised. When I was at school, I had a very short attention span, and I used to write a lot of lines for talking in class and stuff like that. I was made to feel like I wasn’t worthy of achieving.

“Because I wasn’t recognised for things for things when I was in school, it still feels surreal that somebody could choose me out of all those people.

“I can have the surgery reversed. I could get rid of the bag if I wanted to, and not have a stoma. But I choose to keep it, because I feel like I’ve lived such a full life with it.”