It almost turned into a deadlift.
A British gym shark who thought he pulled a muscle while working out was flabbergasted to discover the lump was actually a cancerous lump.
“The lump was quite large and about the size of an apple,” Tomas Evans, 18, told Kennedy News of the tumor.
The exercise enthusiast, from Wrexham, Wales, had noticed a painful apple-sized bump after a weight training session in June, but initially thought it was just a a “gym injury”.
“I went to the gym and two days later I woke up with a big lump on my shoulder and it hurt a lot,” Evans said. “I thought it was just a muscle that moved or something and it wasn’t.”
Although his boo seemed harmless, the Welsh boy’s worried mother, Rachael Tudor, took her son to the doctor. They then referred him for shoulder and chest X-rays, and eventually a CT scan, which revealed something sinister.
While Tudor also initially thought her gym-addicted son had just damaged something, she grew alarmed after “receiving a letter in the post discussing her results”.
“I immediately knew something was wrong,” said the distraught hospital technician, who later learned the “heartbreaking news” that his pride and joy had “a fist-sized mass in Her chest”.
“He went straight for blood tests and a biopsy to see what exactly it was and we were up against non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma or testicular cancer,” she lamented. “We came home and cried for the whole two weeks waiting for the test results.”
She added: “It was the most horrifying two weeks of our lives, because the crippling anxiety of what we were facing on Earth was horrific.”
Their worst fears were confirmed in July after doctors diagnosed Evans with stage 2 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer that affects the lymphatic system, which plays a role in the body’s immune function. The disease causes uncontrolled growth of white blood cells, also called lymphocytes, causing swollen lymph nodes and tumors throughout the body.
Hodgkin’s lymphoma is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in adolescents between the ages of 15 and 19, according to Cancer.org.
The teenager was devastated by the news. “He [the diagnosis] It’s a weird moment to describe because it didn’t really hit me right away, it was a bit later,” he recalls. “When they first told me there was ‘something there’ it was a shock, but when they said what it actually was I kind of knew what it was. would, I had a feeling.”
Evans’ case was particularly difficult to diagnose as he had no symptoms apart from his mass in his collarbone – seen on accompanying x-rays – which was caused by the mass in his chest. Nevertheless, doctors believe he had caught the tumor early as it had formed at the start of the year.
In order to fight the disease, the aspiring electrician began chemotherapy in September, Kennedy reported. Salvation came five weeks ago after his scans revealed he had no cancer, but he nevertheless “decided to do the treatment until the end of February just to make sure he is gone everywhere”.
Although he may have been tested without cancer, Evans said the chemo had taken its toll on his body. “I had to take a year off from college and stop working and being able to go out is a lot harder now because I’m at high risk for infections,” he said. “I get tired quite easily walking around places and doing normal things, especially closer to when I got the treatment.”
Additionally, the chemo made Evans more susceptible to immune disorders. “Thomas ended up in hospital badly several times with neutropenic sepsis and the worry that he was catching infections was our main concern at this time of year,” his mother said.
Despite the hurdles, Tudor said she’s happy ‘he’s on the right path and doing well’, adding that she’s ‘so proud of him and how he’s gotten through it. got out”.
She even set up a GoFundMe page to raise money so her son and girlfriend Morgan could take a vacation to celebrate the end of his treatment. They aim to donate the rest to a charity that helps lymphone sufferers.
In light of his epic saga, Evans warns the public against ignoring even seemingly harmless symptoms.
“I would tell others who have symptoms to go get checked out because I didn’t know, only that I was hurting myself, otherwise I still wouldn’t know,” he said.
