A young woman has urged people to listen to their bodies after being diagnosed with cancer due to a strange symptom that only appeared when she drank alcohol.
Lucy Wiswould-Green, 24, said she first realised something was wrong when she started feeling excessively tired – although she initially put it down to her physically demanding dance degree.
The University of Salford student was training 12 hours a day, so she ignored her fatigue and thought it was part of the tough journey – until other worrying symptoms started to appear.
Lucy, from Lincoln, noticed she had a few lumps in her neck, while an ultrasound scan also located one in her breast.
Lucy Wiswould-Green was alarmed after noticing a strange symptom that appeared when she drank alcohol (SWNS)
Additionally, every time a drop of alcohol passed her lips, she suffered “night sweats and a bad rash.”
She explained: “I started experiencing symptoms in October. Night sweats and a big rash every time I had a drop of alcohol.
“I went to the doctor for the first time in January. I didn’t feel bad, but I thought I needed to get checked out. It was mostly fatigue. I just felt more tired than usual, but as a dancer, it’s hard to know where to draw the line.
“It was towards the end of March that I started noticing lumps in my neck and an ultrasound located another one in my chest. The one in my neck started to become a massive lump.
“Despite its size, everything came back normal. It felt like a big golf ball and I had trouble moving my collarbone. The next morning I wasn’t convinced by the result, so I called the doctors and asked for a scan.”
The scary thing was that the signs Lucy had spotted were all too familiar: three years earlier, her mother had experienced exactly the same thing.
However, as her mother Melissa was “very ill before her diagnosis” and she wasn’t, Lucy said neither of them “were too worried” about her facing the same health issue.
The 24-year-old dance student was diagnosed with the same cancer as her mother (SWNS)
“I was dancing 12 hours a day, so I never thought I would have been able to do this if I had cancer,” the 24-year-old added.
Doctors later diagnosed Lucy with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which the NHS describes as a “relatively aggressive cancer that can spread quickly through the body”.
This is a type of cancer that develops in the lymphatic system, which is basically a network of vessels and glands throughout the body, and is known to cause pain in the lymph nodes when drinking alcohol.
Mum Melissa had received the same news in 2019, before being given the all-clear in April 2020 – but her daughter was devastated at the thought she was “going to watch me go through what she had been through”.
Lucy continued: “He started to tell me what it was, but I already knew because I told him my mother had it.
“She had survived all of that and had seen her daughter go through the exact same thing.”
Lucy was forced to interrupt her studies to undergo grueling chemotherapy treatment and struggled with the side effects, but luckily she had her mother by her side.
She graduated amazingly and did charity work after undergoing treatment – and got the all-clear (SWNS)
The dance student explained: “I can’t explain what chemotherapy feels like, what the symptoms are or what you feel. It’s not just feeling sick and tired, it’s just horrible.
“But when I had her and she was there with me, she knew exactly what I was feeling. It was quite relieving actually because I didn’t have to try to explain what I needed.”
Somehow, Lucy found the strength to do good in the world while she was recovering.
She has raised money for the Teenage Cancer Trust by rollerblading 300 miles around her home city of Lincoln, run the Race for Life in aid of Cancer Research UK, donated her hair and made more than 200 hand-painted cards for people who will be lonely this Christmas.
Lucy explained: “I wanted to do something physical, something that would help raise money for the charity but also help me get back to university in September.
“My doctor told me I wouldn’t be able to go back in September to do a full-time dance class and I thought, ‘Look at me.’ I wasn’t going to let this get me down. I was going to go back and finish my studies.”
Lucy went on to graduate with a first class degree in dance and win the university’s Outstanding Commitment Award – as well as being declared free of Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Her teacher described her as an “unstoppable force”…and I think we can all agree.
