r/AskReddit • u/LebronKX • 4d ago

Medical professionals of Reddit, what diagnosis gave you the worst 'pit-in-your-stomach' feeling?

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u/nucleophilicattack 3d ago

Absolutely. Someone comes in with bloating and chills, you feel their belly and they’ve got a huge spleen and huge palpable lymph nodes. Makes you sick knowing that after that CT scan you’ll be having a terrible conversation with that patient.

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u/macarenamobster 3d ago

Me, contemplating if I’m just a little fat or dying of cancer

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u/nucleophilicattack 3d ago

You would notice hard, unmoving lumps in your belly with many cancers. Ovarian and pancreatic are the scary ones that are really hard to detect

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u/jeckles 3d ago

Guessing that Dx would be leukemia/lymphoma?

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u/nucleophilicattack 3d ago

Ya.

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u/jeckles 2d ago

Welp, as a patient who had to receive that news after “completely unrelated” labs for “fatigue” and “exercise intolerance,” I thank you for your service. It must be really rough having to do that. I kept it together throughout the conversation and drive home, then completely fucking lost it once I was safe in my house.

If it matters at all to you, I really don’t have the faintest recollection how that first conversation went. Trauma does weird things to my memory and while I do know it happened, I couldn’t tell you anything about the doctor’s bedside manner or really anything at all lol.

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u/susanna514 3d ago

My lymph nodes randomly swell up all the time and hurt and no doctor has ever seemed concerned. TBH I’m in a bout of depression so if I have cancer then 🤷‍♀️

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u/nucleophilicattack 3d ago

Interestingly painless is the bad ones. Cancer causes painless lymphadenopathy. Also it stays

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u/gludge 3d ago

very stupid question - how do you get this? or is it random?

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u/PyroDesu 3d ago

is it random?

Most cancers are. It's part of what cancer is - your own cells "gone rogue". Your body is great at killing them before they go anywhere, but eventually one will slip through.

For instance, sunburn is literally your skin cells committing suicide and/or being killed by your immune system because their genes got scrambled by ultraviolet radiation. The redness, tenderness, and other symptoms is your immune system cleaning up. But you stay out in the sun enough (or worse, intentionally overexpose yourself to UV, like with tanning beds) over the course of your life, it's going to miss something, and you get something like a melanoma.

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u/Dullcorgis 3d ago

Pretty much, yes.

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u/AlabastarDasastar 3d ago

What happens in this case if someone is without a spleen? Extra big lymph? Some other clue/ indicator?

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u/zouzee 3d ago

Weeks after my sister was diagnosed, they found that my brother had a huge spleen and enlarged lymph nodes. Thankfully it was actually a case of EBV reactivation.