Cancer warning: 'The symptoms I ignored when I was 20 turned out to be a brain tumour'

She had been experiencing persistent headaches since 2022, during her first year at college, yet remained convinced they were simply migraines.

"It never crossed my mind that this could be caused by something severe," she said in a recent TikTok clip. "I just always had it in my head that I had some sort of migraine condition."

But the pain was so intense that Allison frequently found herself unable to leave her dormitory, with episodes striking at least three times each week. Despite the severity, she dismissed any notion that something sinister might be responsible.

The headaches themselves were particularly brutal when they struck, engulfing her entire head with a pulsating sensation that left her feeling nauseous.

"But when they were bad, they were bad," she recalled. "It was my whole head, and it was a pulsating feeling, and I would get nauseous."

What made the situation particularly deceptive was the intermittent nature of her suffering, as she would sometimes go a fortnight without experiencing any significant pain, which reinforced her belief that nothing was seriously amiss.

"I need to stress that these headaches would be on and off, so two weeks would go without having a bad headache, which is why I didn't think it was serious," she explained.

This pattern of relief between episodes proved dangerously misleading.

The true warning signs emerged just a fortnight before her tumour was discovered, by which point the growth had already reached the size of a golf ball.

Her peripheral vision in the lower left corner of her left eye began deteriorating, with starry disturbances that initially lasted mere minutes before becoming increasingly frequent and prolonged.

Simultaneously, she was battling overwhelming exhaustion, sleeping eight hours nightly yet still requiring afternoon naps lasting between three and five hours.

"I genuinely just thought I was lazy," she admitted.

The most frightening episode occurred following a hot pilates class, when she became profoundly disoriented and struggled to navigate around other people. After lying down, pins and needles spread across the entire left side of her body.

Doctors would later confirm this was a focal seizure, though she initially attributed it to a blood sugar crash.

Her vision continued to worsen until one morning, following a night out with friends, she found herself unable to see from her left eye and finally booked a medical appointment. Physicians insisted she attend immediately and arranged blood tests.

"They called me in the next day to ask if I could come in, and I did; that's when they found a 4cm brain tumour," she said.

Medical staff warned her that the swelling around her brain had become so severe that she could have died had she delayed seeking help any longer. Within a week, surgeons successfully removed the tumour entirely.

A month later, pathology results confirmed she had a high-grade glioma.

Her treatment comprised six weeks of radiation therapy, which caused her to lose the middle section of her hair, followed by six months of oral chemotherapy.

Fortunately, medical monitoring has progressed positively, with MRI scans now scheduled every ten weeks rather than the initial eight-week intervals.

"In a couple of days, I am going to be a year and a half in remission," she shared, noting that experience has transformed her into an advocate for bodily awareness.

"I advocate really hard for listening to your body and paying attention to your body," she said. "I knew something was wrong, but I didn't think that it could be something this extreme because I felt immune and too healthy to get cancer."

"But cancer does not discriminate."