Two days after getting her COVID-19 vaccine, Victoria Lang had an “insane” period.
That one abnormal flow uncovered a shocking diagnosis — the 30-year-old pharmacist had cancer.
“I woke up in the morning, and I had to run and get a towel to hold under me,” Lang told South West News Service. “I know what is normal for me and what my periods are like, and this was insane.”
At the time — March 2021 — news was circulating about vaccines possibly affecting menstrual cycles, so Lang decided to wait 24 hours to see if things would get better. But the next day, she said she continued to bleed heavily.
Lang, who lives in Scotland, noted that she had a few bruises on her knees and shoulders, but since she knew how she got them, she said, “Alarm bells weren’t going off.
“But the bruises did take ages to heal properly.”
She called her physician, who ran some blood tests. The next day, her doctor told her she needed to go to the hospital, according to SWNS.
“I knew at that point something was seriously wrong, and I had ‘leukemia’ in my head,” she told the news service.
A doctor told her that it might be leukemia, but that they needed to take a bone marrow sample for confirmation. After being diagnosed with acute promyelocytic leukemia, Lang spent 42 days at a cancer center — and told SWNS that the blood cancer might not have been discovered as quickly if she hadn’t noted the abnormal period.
Lang said she gained weight and went up a dress size. She added: “I have been left with really bad stretch marks. You would think I had had twins, but my skin just couldn’t cope with it.”
The disease is now in remission, and Lang is having normal periods again.
“I would say to people to just trust your instincts. You know what is normal about your own body,” she told SWNS. “I knew my period wasn’t right, and if I hadn’t called the doctors to discuss it, then I might not have been diagnosed as quickly.”
(This story has not been edited by seemayo staff and is published from a rss feed)