It's critical to find the positive when those life-altering events happen. Silver linings are hard to come by, so you have to latch onto them when you can.
And life-altering events don't get more cruel than a cancer diagnosis. The lone silver lining has to be finding it early so it can be dealt with before it becomes deadly.
But finding cancer isn't always as easy as you might think. Some cancers have so few symptoms most people never know what's going on inside their bodies until it's too late. So when fate steps in with a weird sign, it's a mercy.
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1. Positive Pregnancy Test
One reddit user posted about taking a pregnancy test as a joke and having it come out positive. Another user commented that he should see his doctor because that could indicate testicular cancer. Sure enough, his doctor found a small tumor. As it happens, some tumors produce a hormone that the pregnancy test picks up. However, so few tumors produce enough of the hormone for the test to detect that it was kind of a fluke that the user caught his tumor at all.
2. Spotted Over The Airwaves
HGTV host Tarek El Moussa received a warning from a fan who spotted a lump on his neck when she was watching his show. The fan, a registered nurse, emailed the show's producers, asking him to get it checked. A biopsy found the lump was cancerous and surgery showed that the cancer had spread to his lymph nodes. After a round of radioactive iodine therapy and the removal of his thyroid, Tarek is in remission.
3. Pain When Drinking
Reddit user bettysready noticed that whenever she drank, she would get a pain in her shoulder soon after. When the pain got too much to bear, she consulted her doctor, who performed a CAT scan and found a fist-sized tumor beneath her breastbone.
4. Her Best Friend's Nose
Maureen Burns' amazing dog Max earned the title 'best friend' when he sniffed out her cancer. Acting out of character, Max started smelling her breath and then nudging her right breast, where she found a small lump during a self-exam. A biopsy determined she had a cancerous tumor, which she had removed. Maureen credits Max with finding the lump and noted that he returned to his old playful self when she got home from the hospital.
5. Shaving
One reddit user kept nicking himself when he shaved, and only in one spot on the left side of his neck. Changing up his razors regularly helped, but not forever, and not before long he found a lump where he had been nicking himself.
6. Out Of Character Shaving
Another reddit user's father started acting out of character in small ways, which his family believed was just a mid-life crisis. Then he shaved off the mustache he had sported since high school. Alarmed, they made him go to the doctor, who discovered his sense of smell was also gone. An MRI revealed a golf-ball sized brain tumor. After surgical removal, he grew his mustache back. He is now is cancer-free.
7. Lost Laughter
Andrew Llewellyn noticed something was wrong when his usual stockpile of jokes and one-liners dried up. "I used to make people really smile at work but I would find I would start a joke, I'd have four or five people around me, but I couldn't find the punch line and I'd have to stop," he told Metro. Doctors found an egg-sized tumor up against the part of the brain responsible for speech. After it was removed, Andrew was back to his old, jokey self.
8. No Red-Eye Reduction
Julie Fitzgerald noticed something wrong when she took a picture of her two-year-old son with her iPhone and saw that his pupils reflected different colors. One eye showed up red, as expected, but the other was white. A specialist found multiple tumors in his eye, which had to be removed. However, they caught the cancer before it spread into his blood and brain. That photo saved his life.
9. An Itchy Birthmark
No, it had nothing to do with wizardry or Voldemort. Sam Davies' prominent birthmark on her forehead would itch whenever she was pregnant. On her fifth pregnancy, however, it didn't just itch; it swelled until it ruptured and she had to be rushed to the hospital. Doctors found three tumors below and eventually removed them.
10. Marathon Woman
One reddit user's friend suffered some understandable leg pain following a marathon. She chalked it up to a pulled muscle, which would be perfectly reasonable after a marathon. However, after ice, painkillers, and massages didn't work, she got a scan, which turned up a tumor inside of her femur.
11. Swimming With Sharks
It's not often you can say a shark attack saved your life, but Eugene Finney can thank the shark that chomped into his back while he was swimming. After the attack, he had trouble breathing and sleeping, so he sought out professional help. A scan turned up a walnut-sized tumor on his kidney, which doctors believe would have gone on growing for five or six years had the shark bite not led him to seek help.
12. Baby Bump
Madaline Neagu was, by all appearances, nine months pregnant, and ready to welcome a new life into the world. But after suffering severe abdominal pains, she was rushed to the hospital, where doctors discovered she had actually been carrying around an 11-pound tumor. Following surgery to remove the tumor, she's expected to make a full recovery.
Main image via Global News / The Doctors
Collage image via The Telegraph
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