Woman, 28, told weight and hair loss was due to ‘stress’ had to ‘beg’ for scan that revealed cancer

In 2024, at the age of 28, Kayla Lyall started feeling unwell. She was diagnosed with alopecia and started experiencing unexplained weight loss, itchy skin, and fatigue.

When she first brought up her concerns with her doctor, Kayla was quizzed about her stressful job in investments and how her quality of sleep was. She started to focus on things like nutrition and sleep in a bid to improve how she was feeling – but nothing changed.

“I was getting so frustrated,” Kayla, from Vancouver, Canada, tells UNILAD. “Doctors would still dismiss my symptoms as stress, and I don't think stress was causing me to feel winded after hiking up a hill.”

At the beginning, Kayla herself didn’t want to believe she had cancer and thought she had an autoimmune disease. After paying a visit to a naturopath, she started taking ‘every supplement in the book’. She still didn’t feel any better, however.

Kayla adds: “It wasn’t until I developed lumps, started struggling to breathe at night, and began experiencing fainting spells that doctors were like ‘okay, something’s wrong’.”

She also knew deep down that ‘something was very, very wrong’ when she found a lump in her neck on January 10, 2025. A few days later she visited her doctor who referred her for a neck ultrasound.

She had the scan on January 21 but needed a CT scan. By this stage Kayla had done a lot of research about her symptoms and was confident she had some kind of blood cancer. Despite this, she was still put on a six-month waiting list for a CT scan.

Kayla then suffered a scary incident one night where she was coughing so hard that she ‘couldn’t breathe’, sparking her to go see a different healthcare professional in the hopes that her concerns would be taken more seriously. This doctor advised Kayla to have an ultrasound and an X-ray, which discovered a mass.

“The new doctor expedited my CT scan to four months [instead of six], but I was still really struggling,” Kayla shares.

'I went back begging for answers'

During this time she discovered a second lump in her armpit. “It was awful,” Kayla continued. “When they did the first CT scan they only did part of my body, and then I went back begging for answers.”

She was then put on a cancelation list for a scan and was able to get one on February 14 instead of having to wait until June.

The scans lead to Kayla having an emergency biopsy on the lump in her armpit and more bloodwork. Days later she was officially diagnosed with bulky stage II Hodgkin lymphoma.

“If it wasn’t for me calling for cancelations, switching doctors, and begging, almost pleading, for someone to listen to me, the diagnosis would have never happened that fast,” Kayla tells us. “It was spreading so fast. Thank God I went and busted doors down to get somebody to listen to me.”

“My original doctors called me in June telling me to come in for a CT scan, and at this point I was already four months into my chemotherapy,” she goes on. “I was so far ahead of what would have happened had I waited all those months. It’s crazy.”

Kayla, who is now 31, started her chemotherapy on March 12 last year and described her treatment as ‘the red devil’. She says: “It was one of the awful things I had for the entire six months. That’s the one that wipes you.”

'I feel like I can actually breathe again'

But the gruelling treatment was all worth it because Kayla is now cancer free and her recent scans have some back ‘super clear’.

“They gave me a full CT scan, PET scan, all the blood work – everything that I should have had right when everything was starting – and there was absolutely nothing. I feel like I can actually breathe again.”

Now Kayla will have yearly check-ups to make sure her cancer hasn’t returned.

Following the last couple of years being so difficult, Kayla has a new outlook on life. Before her diagnosis she admitted to following ‘regimented rules’.

She tells us: “I was so obsessed with living by these regimented rules that you have to work hard to get a good job, you have to go to the gym everyday, and you have to be disciplined.

“I think [my diagnosis] was a way of my mental health and body telling me to slow down and kick it for a bit and see what that does for my life.”

If you’ve been affected by any of these issues and want to speak to someone in confidence, contact the American Cancer Society on 1-800-227-2345 or via their live chat feature, available 24/7 every day of the year.