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A student had to fight for her health to be taken seriously after a ‘melon-sized’ tumour was initially diagnosed as a UTI.
When Mia Robins was finishing up her first year of uni, she began experiencing awful pain in her abdomen before other symptoms like weight loss, hair loss and fatigue started to creep up.
Concerned about her heath, she went to her doctor for them to dismiss her and give her an array of diagnoses such as alopecia, a UTI and anaemia…but they were wrong. She actually had ovarian cancer.
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The 21-year-old, who was 19 at the time, said: "I had my appendix removed in December 2021 and began experiencing pain the next month.
"I would wake up in pain like I needed the toilet straight away. I felt a lot of pressure and was dying to go to the bathroom, but it would go away as soon as I went to the toilet.
"I was also sleeping for like 12 or 13 hours a day and kept sleeping in for work. I wasn't really eating either. I lost about half a stone and dropped a dress size.
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"Then my hair started falling out. I noticed there was a bald spot at the back of my head the size of my palm.”
That’s when things took a turn for the worse as she noticed a ‘massive bulge in my stomach’ which made her look like she was in her second trimester of pregnancy.
All in all, she had to go to ‘A&E twice in three weeks and had about five GP appointments across six months about my symptoms.’
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She explained: "I was told lots of things like I might have celiac, anaemia, alopecia and a UTI. I told them in A&E that I was crawling to the bathroom in pain and they gave me antibiotics for a UTI but I knew it wasn't that.
"I took the antibiotics and it didn't help at all. I remember thinking I might have cancer and my friend said 'don't be silly'."
But when she went to A&E for the final time and had a scan, they realised their mistake and her tumour was discovered.
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Mia had to have emergency surgery because of its size and thankfully, she was at the ‘earliest stage’ of cancer which made it treatable.
She underwent emergency surgery, and though her cancer returned six months later, she was given the all-clear in August 2023 following successful chemotherapy.
However, Mia admitted she was angry because of how long it took to reach her diagnosis and how she had been dismissed for so long.
She said she felt ignored for those six months and tells other people to ‘always challenge medical staff if you feel something is wrong’ because she ‘could've died if I hadn't kept going to A&E’.
Britt Jones