KellyAnn, United States
On April 10th of 2025, I injured my chest lifting something that was a bit too heavy for me. I didn’t feel it in the moment, but two days later is when I felt I had injured myself. This injury felt like it had ripped through my right shoulder, across my right pec, all the way to my sternum. Shortly after the injury, a bump showed up on the right side of my chest. In the midst of finishing my nursing program in between capstone rotations, working, and volunteering, I ended up dragging myself to urgent care. The x-ray was unremarkable. No displaced ribs, no effusion, nothing. I thought, man, I really did myself in with this one. The provider at the urgent care told me to rotate heat and ice, and that if it didn’t get better to follow up with ortho.
Maybe a month or so goes by and I’m in pain 24/7. I can’t sleep on my left side, my right side, and the injury keeps moving. From across my chest, to my back, down my shoulder blades, my baseline became pain. A couple of friends had recommended a local ortho urgent care to me, where I ended up being turned away because they don’t do ribs and sternum. I tried to get in with my PCP and he was booked out until September. I started thinking, at what point do I go to the ER? My fellow healthcare workers will understand me when I say, I did not want to go to the ER. While this injury was progressing, I started getting other symptoms that, any other day, would’ve raise red flags, but my unremarkable x-ray at the urgent care continued to give me a false peace of mind, so I continued contributing them to the chest injury.
Another month goes by. It’s a Wednesday night and I had just showered. I’m doing my hair and I put my hands above my head and a mass pops up in between my clavicle and my neck where my lymph nodes are. For a split second, I think, She be up in the gym just werkin’ on her fitness, he’s my witness (thank you Fergie for that banger, and also – take away my degree immediately). In the next moment, I was putting the pieces of the puzzle together in the worst way possible. The intermittent shortness of breath, near-constant JVD, the pressure in my neck when I would lay down, a family history of lymphoma, the mass – I knew. As you can imagine, I was almost immediately crying in the club. An x-ray that showed a widening of my mediastinum prompted the ER doctor to order a chest CT angio which showed lymphoma. Almost 2 months and two biopsies later, it was determined that I had primary mediastinal B cell lymphoma. A very rare, aggressive type of non Hodgkin lymphoma.
I felt as though I was in my own twisted version of the upside down. One where I kept fighting for answers, fighting to keep my head above the water while I attempted to claw my way out to safety. I am eternally grateful for the village of providers, friends, and family- each offering something uniquely different, and for allowing me to take what I needed from them at that time, and allowing me to feel seen in a very dark chapter of my life.