Blood cancer is the UK's fifth most common, with lymphoma among its main types - making awareness of the signs vital for better outcomes.
A young woman has revealed how she lived with lymphoma for approximately a year after dismissing recurring shoulder discomfort as a consequence of poor sleeping positions.
Allie Reece, 23, explained that she attributed her symptoms to adjusting to a smaller bed after returning home from university.
But medical examinations eventually revealed a tumour comparable in size to an orange positioned against her chest wall.
Allie's symptoms appeared sporadically for months
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Despite the mass exerting pressure on both her lungs and heart, Allie had experienced only intermittent shoulder pain that occurred every few months.
"My symptoms were things that I had felt for years that weren't out of the ordinary for me," she explained.
The discomfort initially manifested as pain in her collarbone and shoulder approximately 12 months before her diagnosis.
She recalled experiencing these symptoms after relocating from university accommodation to her family home, where she began using a different bed.
"I thought I was just sleeping weird," she explained, noting that the pain occurred infrequently and with minimal intensity.
The symptoms also appeared sporadically, affecting her once every eight to twelve weeks.
She considered the discomfort so unremarkable that she mentioned it solely to her mother, keeping the issue private from others in her life.
The situation escalated dramatically in April when routine activities triggered severe pain. After playing golf and experiencing soreness, she later felt an intense stabbing sensation in her shoulder blade while adjusting her position in bed.
"I leaned up and felt a super sharp pain in my shoulder blade, like somebody had stabbed me. My jaw dropped," she recounted.
A fortnight afterwards, she woke up at approximately 3 am to shoulder blade pain, prompting her mother to accompany her to the emergency department, where medical staff delivered devastating news.
This is when the doctor informed her: "You have a mass in your chest, and it looks like lymphoma."
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Blood cancer is the UK's fifth most common
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"I was bursting out into wailing tears, I literally was useless and dead to the world," she described.
Remarkably, standard medical tests failed to indicate any malignancy. Her oncologist revealed that laboratory results appeared entirely normal, stating that examining only the blood work would not have suggested cancer was present.
The woman underwent three surgical procedures during a four-month period following her diagnosis. She noted that the shoulder pain, which prompted her hospital visit, disappeared after receiving medical attention.
Despite the tumour's considerable size and its impact on vital organs, conventional diagnostic methods proved inadequate in detecting the lymphoma.