A student has been diagnosed with an incurable disease after doctors dismissed her symptoms and suggested it was all in her head.
20-year-old Georgia Ford from Stroud, England, is a University of Exeter student who developed a choking cough in April last year.
Following a visit to her doctor, Georgia was told she’s likely suffering from heartburn due to her drinking habits. She was then told to return home and drink stomach-lining pills her GP had prescribed.
Over the next few months, however, the student’s symptoms failed to improve, and she also began suffering from back pain and weight loss.
“Originally the GP said the sickness was acid reflux from the amount that I was drinking because I was a student. They were like ‘Do you drink a lot? and I was like, ‘Yeah, obviously I do’ so they put me on these stomach lining protection tablets,” Georgia recalled.
“You believe what the doctor says and I thought ‘I do drink a lot, and alcohol’s poison isn’t it? Maybe it is just bothering my stomach a lot.’ But then I came home where I’m not a big drinker and it still carried on, so I was slightly miffed as to why it wasn’t just stopping.
“The tablets didn’t work and then it got put down to various other things.”
Georgia went on to claim that her doctors initially played down her symptoms and suggested her condition was due to anxiety rather than physical problems.
“When they said anxiety could be a contributing factor I was like ‘I don’t consider myself to be an anxious person to begin with and also how can this all be psychological?” the 20-year-old added.
“They basically said that this was all in my head and I wasn’t ill at all. I said, ‘I fail to believe that I’m having this many severe symptoms and it’s all in my head.”
It wasn’t until several months and countless trips to the hospital later that Georgia was finally properly examined and diagnosed with papillary renal cell carcinoma, a type of kidney cancer.
After receiving the shocking news and discovering that her illness was incurable, the student’s life “turned upside down.”
“I’m five months on from starting my treatment now, but I could be further along if I’d been diagnosed earlier,” she added.
“I don’t know how much more ill I became in that time and whether if it had been caught a little bit earlier, my story might be a little bit different. It’s one of those questions that I’ll never know, but always wonder.”
Since her devastating diagnosis and the start of her treatment, Georgia’s condition has progressively worsened, leaving her to struggle with climbing the stairs and walking or running.
Her vomiting also peaked, causing the student to lose over 20 pounds in a matter of months.
Now, the young girl has spoken out and urged people to follow their gut and seek a second opinion if they believe something is wrong with them.
“No matter what a doctor or any healthcare professional says you know your body better than anybody else,” Georgia said.
“If you think that something’s wrong and if you don’t feel that what they’re saying is right, like you deserve a scan or something more, you need to push and push.
“You’re better off to have pushed and to know for sure that it’s not cancer than to leave it and to find out that it was.”
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