- Symptoms like fatigue and swelling usually don't mean cancer, so patients and doctors can miss them.
- Insider talked to five women who were diagnosed with stage 4 cancer after these signs were missed.
Usually, a headache, a spell of fatigue, or stomach pain is no big deal — explained by a reaction to a strong perfume, a stressful workweek, or too much cheese.
But sometimes, ubiquitous symptoms like these are indicative of something more serious, like cancer. And when the milder signs are brushed off by patients, their doctors, or both, the disease can progress to stage 4, meaning it's spread to organs throughout the body. Depending on the type of cancer, at this stage, it usually doesn't go into remission.
This year, many people talked to Insider about their delayed cancer diagnoses and what they wished they or their clinicians had done differently to catch it sooner. Here are five of their stories.
A mom said doctors dismissed her severe pain as a gallbladder issue
When Casey Ward first went to the emergency room with a sharp stomach pain, she said clinicians told her she was likely just constipated.
For months, the pain came back in waves, and doctors eventually settled on "a bad gallbladder" as a diagnosis, Ward said. By then, she'd become pregnant with her second child, so a gallbladder-removal surgery had to wait.
Throughout her pregnancy, Ward's pain intensified. She said she barely left the house because it hurt to walk. Even a deep breath would spark sharp pain. Ward said she begged doctors to operate.
"They're like, 'No, we don't want to hurt the baby,'" the then-31-year-old paramedic in South Carolina told Insider. "It was a very long nine months."
When she was two months postpartum, an ultrasound spotted a tumor the size of a grapefruit. It was cancer that had spread from her bile duct to her leg and lung. One doctor gave her anywhere from a day to six months to live.
When she talked to Insider in July, she was on oral chemotherapy and planning to be considered for various experimental treatments.
"It's always the mentality of, 'We just need to make sure we're fighting for your life,'" she said.
A woman thought her inability to concentrate was grief and anxiety
First, Sunny Thukral's grandfather died. Then, she started her clinical year at a prestigious veterinary school in California. About the same time, she went through a breakup.
So when Thukral, then 26, developed increasingly intense headaches in spring 2022 and began tripping over even the simplest calculations in school, she thought it was a physical manifestation of her grief and stress.
But when she went to urgent care crying from pain and confusion and hoping for migraine medication, clinicians gave her a CT scan. A few days later, she was diagnosed with stage 4 glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer.
Thukral, who documented her experience on TikTok, underwent surgery to remove most of the tumor, followed by six weeks of radiotherapy.
While only an estimated 17% of people with glioblastoma survive their second year with it, according to NORD, she's prepared to beat the odds.
"If you are given a diagnosis and a prognosis that you don't like to hear, don't listen," Thukral told Insider about five months after her diagnosis. "I'm not living my life on a timeline of two, three, four years. I am expecting to still get married. I'm going to have kids. I'm going to watch them grow up. I'm going to manifest that to happen."
A woman thought her pregnancy had caused her fatigue and swelling
When Erin Basinger noticed a lump near her armpit, she pushed her concerns aside. She'd always had some fatty tissue in that area and had recently undergone surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome. Perhaps, she thought, the procedure had prompted some fat redistribution.
Even when it continued to grow in 2020 during and after her first pregnancy, Basinger chalked it up to hormones. Doctors hadn't raised concerns at any prenatal and postpartum visits.
Basinger, now a 36-year-old professor in North Carolina, had been battling extreme fatigue, too, but figured that's what pregnancy and new parenthood was like.
But when she was more than six months postpartum, the mass had grown to the size of a grapefruit. She visited a doctor in December 2021 and was diagnosed with stage 4 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
"It was terrifying in general, and for me, it was terrifying because I had a 7-month-old," she said.
Basinger went through six rounds of chemotherapy and is in remission.
A 29-year-old was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer after an ultrasound didn't detect it
Kristine Stone felt a lump in her right breast at age 29 and requested a mammogram. But per protocol for women under 30, clinicians gave her only an ultrasound, which didn't turn up any problems. Her second request for a mammogram was also denied.
Six months later, she was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes and bones. By then, her lump was more noticeable, her right arm and hand had gone numb, and her armpit was "super sore," Stone, who lives in Washington, told Insider.
When clinicians told her it was cancer, Stone said she thought, "No shit. I told you that six months ago. Now how do we get it out of here?"
Stone underwent about nine months of chemotherapy and a surgery to remove cancer in her brain. When she talked to Insider in September, she was undergoing immunotherapy treatments every three weeks.
If the disease goes into remission, Stone said she might want to volunteer as a hairstylist for others going through or recovering from cancer.
"But at the same time," she added, "I'm also sick and tired of cancer."
Another woman was told she was too young for a mammogram
Philecia La'Bounty also requested a mammogram after feeling a lump in her breast — and was denied twice since her ultrasound looked normal.
"I had perfect blood work, no other symptoms, no other masses, so they denied any other treatment, told me I was too young to have breast cancer, that I was healthy — it was just a cyst and come back if it bothered me," La'Bounty, then a 31-year-old in California, said on TikTok.
Eight months later, La'Bounty was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. Now 35 years old and likely on chemotherapy for life, she shared her story to encourage other young women to be aware of their breast-cancer risk and push for answers when something feels off in their bodies.
"Had I seen someone that I related to, that was posting about this, I would have taken my situation more seriously," she told Insider. "I would have fought harder. I would have found a way to pay for a mammogram."