Young patient waited ten months before being diagnosed w... (staging. The whole process meant that he...)

Young patient waited ten months before being diagnosed with cancer

Date:6/8/2008

staging. The whole process meant that he was not correctly diagnosed for more than ten months; much of this delay was due to professional delay within our current hospital system. He is just coming towards the end of his treatment now.

"It's a worrying story, but unfortunately not a rare one."

The young man who is now 21 (and wishes to remain anonymous) said that he first noticed the lump at the end of March last year and he went to his GP in early July. Initially he thought it was a muscle tear from playing rugby, but when it didn't go away he went to his doctor. "During the following six months until I started treatment at the Christie, the lump grew from 2.5 x 2.5 cms to 15 x 13 cms. But apart from that, I didn't have any other symptoms, although just as I started at the Christie I began to get night sweats."

The patient, who is team manager in a bank's customer services department, will be finishing his chemotherapy treatment on 30 June and has been told that there's no sign of any cancer remaining. However, he remains concerned about the way he was treated before he finally received the correct diagnosis.

"When I was referred to the first hospital I was told on two separate occasions that there was definitely no cancer. They had identified it as either a lipoma, a non-malignant tumour of the fat cells, or a hernia. But I have since seen in letters that they sent to the second hospital that actually they had no idea what it was."

As he had been told it wasn't cancer, he didn't worry about it at that stage, but once he was given a correct diagnosis, he wanted to start treatment as quickly as possible. "I was told that Hodgkin lymphoma was one of the easiest forms of cancer to cure and the treatment is very successful. I was anxious to get started and was frustrated because while all these delays were going on I wasn't being treated. I was very relieved when I got the first dose of chemotherapy into me."

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Contact: Emma Mason
wordmason@mac.com
44-077-112-96986
Teenage Cancer Trust
Source:Eurekalert

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