She thought she had simple eczema: the red patch on the 27-year-old's leg was hiding a rare form of blood cancer
|In 2023, a British woman discovers a red spot on her leg and thinks it is eczema. The young woman actually suffers from a rare blood cancer.
Jessica Hamersley lives in Essex, a county northeast of London in England. The 27-year-old woman sees a red spot on her left shin in 2023, but she doesn't pay much attention to it, despite its recurring appearance, reports the Daily Mail.
"I was in very good health"
Jessica then thinks it's irritation or eczema from a scented moisturizer she uses. Her fiancé then suggests she get tested because he thinks it could be a birth control pill.
In October 2023, the verdict falls and the medical results are far from what she thought: a mass is found in her chest. After several biopsies, the young woman suffers from Hodgkin's lymphoma. “I thought maybe it was a flare-up on my leg or maybe I had messed up shaving. You never think about cancer,”, Jessica explained, as quoted by the British media outlet.
“I was very healthy. In fact, I feel even worse because of the chemotherapy than before. I felt perfectly healthy despite all these tumors. In general, Hodgkin's lymphoma can be accompanied by many other symptoms. I had nothing", adds the sick young woman.
A disease detected early
The cancer was diagnosed at stage 2. In other words, "the lymphoma was in two or more groups of lymph nodes, but there were no typical symptoms", details the Daily Mail.
Jessica Hamersley had no choice but to start chemotherapy at the beginning of the year, a treatment that the young woman found difficult. "I cried when they told me I was going to lose my hair. Now it's growing back so it doesn't bother me as much, I'm used to it. But you go into fight mode and it's just a matter of survival. We just wonder: 'What's next ? What do we do ?'", she says.
Last August, the 27-year-old announced she was cancer-free. "I'm really glad it was caught early and the treatment was less expensive than it should have been,", she says. She still has several tests to make sure the cancer doesn't come back.