3 ms·

My mom had a cough that wouldn't go away and covid 3 or 4 times during the last 2 years. Turns out those symptoms were hiding breast cancer, which metasticized

My mom had a cough that wouldn't go away and covid 3 or 4 times during the last 2 years. Turns out those symptoms were hiding breast cancer, which metasticized in 2 years, the chemo symptoms because too bad and so she had to stop, and now she's gone. She was 59. When I went to her house to tend to her dogs, she had been looking at retirement and hospice care for her "live out my last days" cancer life basically next door to me (she lives in a different state). Fuck cancer.

jcims 4y ago
The cough that wouldn’t go away was a bellwether to my wife’s ovarian cancer. She was incredibly stubborn when it came to medical issues and had been experiencing some pain in her side that I had been stressing for her to get seen for. She went to urgent care and they did nothing, bolstering her opinion that it was worthless being seen for it. The cough was a dry cough that was not very frequent but the older women in her periphery were very concerned about it. I didn’t think much of it, just a dry cough. The women in the other hand would say things like ‘I really don’t like that cough’ with a concerned face. I don’t know if they had an internalized correlation or it was just a sense of something wrong. It turns out that this is a fairly common symptom.
bane 4y ago
Argh, too young! I'm so sorry to hear about this. Covid has really messed up the system badly. The medical treatment funnel gets very myopic treating the most present thing first, and often misses other problems going on at the same time. With my Dad we think the doctors were very focused on some other health issues that were complications from a knee replacement he had done about 5 years before. The "you can only come in for a visit for one problem at a time" broken insurance system would have had him coming in all day, every day for visits, so he just went for what bothered him the most. Turns out his lung cancer wasn't his worst problem until it was.

jcims 4y ago

The cough that wouldn’t go away was a bellwether to my wife’s ovarian cancer. She was incredibly stubborn when it came to medical issues and had been experiencing some pain in her side that I had been stressing for her to get seen for. She went to urgent care and they did nothing, bolstering her opinion that it was worthless being seen for it. The cough was a dry cough that was not very frequent but the older women in her periphery were very concerned about it. I didn’t think much of it, just a dry cough. The women in the other hand would say things like ‘I really don’t like that cough’ with a concerned face. I don’t know if they had an internalized correlation or it was just a sense of something wrong. It turns out that this is a fairly common symptom.

bane 4y ago

Argh, too young! I'm so sorry to hear about this. Covid has really messed up the system badly. The medical treatment funnel gets very myopic treating the most present thing first, and often misses other problems going on at the same time. With my Dad we think the doctors were very focused on some other health issues that were complications from a knee replacement he had done about 5 years before. The "you can only come in for a visit for one problem at a time" broken insurance system would have had him coming in all day, every day for visits, so he just went for what bothered him the most. Turns out his lung cancer wasn't his worst problem until it was.