When a healthy woman suddenly began experiencing strange symptoms, she knew something was wrong, but she had to fight to be diagnosed for months.
Lindsay, 27, was living life like any normal woman at the time, when something happened that changed her life forever.
It all began during an innocent outing, which left her feeling like something was wrong, and now she wants to share her story to help others too.
Advert
Having been made to believe that what she was experiencing was all in her head, Lindsay described the ordeal she underwent for months until the answer was finally discovered as being cancer.
Lindsay experienced a fainting episode one day while she was on the subway, which was a scary experience for her, but she didn’t believe that it signified anything underlying.
It wasn’t, however, until she began to feel as though she was concussed in the following days that she booked a visit to her primary care physician.
Advert
From there, she expected to find out what was wrong with her, and why she was feeling worse and worse each day.
But her bloodwork was fine, although her blood pressure was low.
With nothing more than a referral to a blood pressure specialist, Lindsay was none the wiser about why she fainted and why she was starting to feel so wrong within her body.
Lindsay shared how she began to feel shortly after fainting, which indicated to her that something just wasn’t right.
Advert
At first, it was a concussed feeling, and then cognitively, she appeared to be ‘spaced’ out when talking to her friends - from there, it got worse.
Lindsay told the YouTube channel, The Patient Story: “I felt my body shutting down, which was, again, something I've never experienced in my life. And it all started with this one fainting episode.”
She added: “I was having trouble making it up the stairs and I had really bad sensitivity to noise, so when a siren passed me. I just totally shut down. It was ten times worse for me than anyone else.”
Advert
Her meeting with the specialist didn’t yield any more results, as again, everything with Lindsay appeared to be fine internally, even though she was experiencing her strange feeling, low energy, weight loss and more.
Another specialist even suggested that she must have an eating disorder and prescribed her antidepressants that are known to cause weight gain in female patients as a fix.
At first, he believed she had something called ‘Addison's disease', which is where your adrenal glands are completely drained, because that's what it kind of looked like’, but when it came back negative, an eating disorder is what he believed she must have.
Feeling lost and unheard, Lindsay continued her fight to find out what was going on.
Advert
She said: “I went to a neurologist, a cardiologist, rheumatologist, a holistic doctor. I went to acupuncturists. Anyone, because I had every symptom under the sun.”
Lindsay was even told by one specialist to ‘go to therapy’ as it as alluded that her symptoms were all in her head.
But when she visited the holistic doctor, who immediately checked her hormones, a marker for elevated ‘C for A level’, meaning that her body was inflamed and fighting something.
To Lindsay, this was proof that she was sick, and somebody had to listen to her.
Advert
She was then diagnosed with POTS.
The Cleveland Clinic notes that POTS is: “Postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) is a condition that causes a number of symptoms when you transition from lying down to standing up, such as a fast heart rate, dizziness and fatigue. While there’s no cure, several treatments and lifestyle changes can help manage the symptoms of POTS.”
But that wasn’t the answer to all of her problems.
Advert
As it turned out, she had been suffering from Thyroid cancer, which was only picked up weeks later during an ultrasound of her neck and heart which picked up thyroid nodules which turned out to be malignant.
From there, Linday was fast tracked to having her thyroid removed as it was noted that her cancer spread to her lymph nodes.
Now, she is sharing her story about her fight to getting diagnosed.
She said: “I felt like I wasn't being heard, and that's the issue with invisible illness is that people can't see it.”
Britt Jones