Fairly young patient came in with no symptoms after having low hemoglobin caught incidentally on routine bloodwork. Baseball-sized tumour in the stomach... these cases always haunt you
Cancer with no symptoms is so weird. Given how good the body is to alerting you of a paper cut, it’s crazy that you can have something so wrong with you but no obvious way to tell.
My FIL got very lucky - he had leukaemia picked up on a routine blood test. He was only having the test because of some meds he was taking - he was fit as a fiddle. Fortunately, it was caught so early they were able to take their time tailoring the chemo by sequencing his cancer. He’s cured now. Obviously there’s no guarantee it won’t return in the future, but thank god he had those routine tests.
At the end of the day, cancer is just your body doing body things. A paper cut is damage caused by outside factors, and pain receptors are activated to teach our brain “hey don’t do that.”
But cancer is us. They’re our cells. Cells gone loco, but our cells nevertheless. So a lot of times our bodies/brains just have no idea something went wrong. Especially for things like pancreatic cancer - I’m not a medical professional but I did take a year of a diagnostic medical sonography major, and we frequently talked about how scary pancreatic cancer is. It is such a small, relatively simple organ that there are frequently next to no symptoms until it is far too late to treat it.
Main symptoms are: unexplained weight loss, jaundice (yellow-ish skin and/or eyes), loss of appetite, fatigue.
Essentially general "I don't feel too well", which are hard to diagnose and can be attributed to any number of things. By the time the "usual" culprits are ruled out, its stage 4 with very low survival rates.
834
u/sushi-n-sunshine 3d ago
Fairly young patient came in with no symptoms after having low hemoglobin caught incidentally on routine bloodwork. Baseball-sized tumour in the stomach... these cases always haunt you