A student living in Australia named the only symptom of a deadly disease, having found which, she consulted a doctor on time and was able to recover. Her story was shared by the Daily Mail.
In October 2018, at that time, 20-year-old Rikki Stern woke up with a feeling that her neck was numb. She was also haunted by the feeling that something was stuck in her throat. “It felt like a grain of popcorn was scratching my throat,” she explained.
The frightened girl turned to the nearest therapist, who sent her for an ultrasound scan. A month later, Stern was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the body’s lymphatic system. Doctors discovered that a tumor the size of a grapefruit had grown inside her body from neck to chest.
The patient was prescribed a six-month course of chemotherapy. Doctors were afraid to subject the girl to radiation therapy due to the fact that the tumor was too close to the chest. Before treatment, several eggs were removed from Stern in order to freeze them and enable her to become a mother in the future.
The treatment was successful, but it had many side effects: the girl developed mouth ulcers, she suffered from constant bone pain, weakness and constipation. Also, her hair, eyelashes and eyebrows have completely fallen out. Stern claims that the support of her parents and lover helped her not to become discouraged, who even dressed her when she was very bad.
Nevertheless, after a month of chemotherapy, the doctors announced to her that she was completely healthy. The girl asked the doctors to introduce her to her peers with the same diagnosis, but they refused, citing medical confidentiality. Then Stern created a support group for cancer patients – she opened a branch of the Cancer Chicks organization in Australia. In two years, the number of participants has grown to 600.
Hodgkin’s lymphoma is a malignant disease of lymphoid tissue. Currently, the treatment is relatively successful, but if diagnosed late, it can lead to death.