The Importance of Advocating for Your Health
- Georgia Ford, of Stroud, England, is a 20-year-old aspiring lawyer. Now, she’s fighting metastatic kidney cancer after doctors said her initial symptoms were due to drinking alcohol.
- According to one of our experts, kidney cancer is most often found when doctors are performing scans for a reason other than suspected kidney cancer.
- Advocating for your health is extremely important. You never know when speaking up about issues with your body can make a world of difference for health outcomes. One of our experts says that there should be a plan for what the doctor is going to do for you after you leave every appointment.
Georgia Ford, of Stroud, England, was a college student who was studying to become a criminal lawyer when she went to her doctor concerned about her cough.
Read More“The tablets didn’t work and then it got put down to various other things,” she explained. “There was a time that they thought it was maybe an anxiety thing and it was more of a psychological symptom than actually a physical problem.
“When they said anxiety could be a contributing factor I was like ‘I don’t consider myself to be an anxious person, to begin with and also how can this all be psychological?”
Her cough got so severe that she stopped being able to walk or run as far as usual and struggled to climb stairs. She also started vomiting and feeling pains in her back and shoulder.
“I’d coughed so much that I’d end up being sick,” Ford said. “That’s when I started to lose weight because I wasn’t holding onto food very well.
“I put my back pain down to bad posture or sleeping positions. I’ve always slumped and sat funny… You just don’t think these things are bigger than they are, you just think, ‘Oh well, it’s part of what it is.'”
Things really escalated when she started coughing up blood and had to be rushed to the hospital. There an X-Ray revealed “cloudy patches” on her lungs, but Ford said her doctors were sure it wasn’t “anything life-threatening.” From there, she was referred to a respiratory team, but she still continued to feel worse.
After booking a private appointment, Ford eventually got answers: She had a type of kidney cancer called papillary renal cell carcinoma. She later found out that it had spread to her lungs, liver, lymph nodes and bones.
“There’s very few times in my life where I’ve been speechless and I was sat there and words just completely evaded me, I didn’t know what to say,” she said. “It was just the most sinking feeling to be told basically the worst-case scenario and I was just so disappointed in everything.”
Fast forward to today and Ford is receiving immunotherapy treatments which involves taking medication daily and having an intravenous drip every fortnight. She also takes portable oxygen tanks out with her and uses an oxygen pipe at night to breathe more comfortably. The goal of her treatment is to shrink her cancer as much as possible to allow her to “live normally.” She hopes to return to her law classes when she’s feeling better.
“I’ve come a long way [my diagnosis] and I’m on my way to accepting and just learning to live with it and doing what I can within the constraints of my life now,” she said. “But at the time I’d gone from being a full university student within a few weeks to being in hospital as a cancer patient. It was just unbelievable.
“It’s literally turned my life upside down.”
Now, she’s sharing her story in the hopes that she can push others to advocate for their health when they know something is off.
“I’m five months on from starting my treatment now, but I could be further along if I’d been diagnosed earlier,” she said. “No matter what a doctor or any healthcare professional says you know your body better than anybody else… If you think that something’s wrong and if you don’t feel that what they’re saying is right, like you deserve a scan or something more, you need to push and push.
“You’re better off to have pushed and to know for sure that it’s not cancer than to leave it and to find out that it was.”
Understanding Kidney Cancer
Kidney cancer develops when cells in the kidneys a pair of bean-shaped organs each about the size of a fist begin to grow out of control. Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is the most common type of kidney cancer with about 9 out of 10 kidney cancers being RCCs.
It is estimated that about 79,000 new cases of kidney cancer (50,290 in men and 28,710 in women) will be diagnosed in the United States for 2022, so here are some signs of the disease to look out for:
- Blood in the urine (hematuria)
- Low back pain on one side (not caused by injury)
- A mass (lump) on the side or lower back
- Fatigue (tiredness)
- Loss of appetite
- Weight loss not caused by dieting
- Fever that is not caused by an infection and doesn't go away
- Anemia (low red blood cell counts)
In the case of Ford, she experienced a “choking cough” which was likely due to the fact that her cancer had spread to her lungs. According to UCLA Health, kidney cancer can metastasize, or spread, to any part of the body through the blood or lymphatic system. When that happens, the first signs of cancer may not be specific to your kidneys.
Symptoms of metastatic kidney cancer may cause symptoms in the newly affected areas of the body including:
- The lungs, causing cough and shortness of breath
- The bones, resulting in bone pain or fracture
- The brain, presenting as headaches, confusion or seizures
That being said, all of these signs do not necessarily mean you have cancer. Still, you should always bring up any changes to your health with your doctors.
"Traditionally, kidney cancer was diagnosed in people coming in with blood in the urine, a mass [in the] belly that was big enough that you could feel, or pain on that side," Dr. Geoffrey Sonn, a urologic oncologist with Stanford Hospital and Clinics, previously told SurvivorNet. "More recently because of the great increase in the use of imaging with ultrasound, CAT scans, MRI most kidney cancers [are] diagnosed incidentally, meaning a scan is done for another reason."
Dr. Sonn says doctors finding a mass seen on imaging done for another reason is "the most common presentation" of the disease. Some patients without symptoms might discover their cancer through scans done for unrelated reasons, and other might discover the cancer after a scan to investigate abdominal pain. Either way, it's important to stay up to date on check ups and speak with your doctors about any possible signs of something being wrong.
"For localized kidney cancer, for relatively small masses that have not metastasized, most often patients feel nothing, and this is found on a scan done for another reason," he said. "For larger masses of the kidney they may have pain on that side, they may see blood in the urine or a routine urine test may show a microscopic amount of blood in the urine that's not enough to be seen visually but still will prompt further testing with imaging that shows the kidney cancer."
The Importance of Advocating for Your Health
Whether you are currently battling cancer or worried that you might have it, it's always important to advocate for your health. Cancer is an incredibly serious disease, and you have every right to insist that your doctors investigate any possible signs of cancer.
Or if you simply have no idea what's causing issues with your body, you should still seek professional help. You never know when speaking up about a seemingly unimportant issue can lead to a very important diagnosis cancer or otherwise.
Be Pushy, Be Your Own Advocate… Don't Settle
"Every appointment you leave as a patient, there should be a plan for what the doc is going to do for you, and if that doesn't work, what the next plan is," Dr. Zuri Murell, director of the Cedars-Sinai Colorectal Cancer Center, told SurvivorNet in a previous interview. "And I think that that's totally fair. And me as a health professional that's what I do for all of my patients."
In a previous interview with SurvivorNet, April Knowles explained how she became a breast cancer advocate after her doctor dismissed the lump in her breast as a side effect of her menstrual period.
Unfortunately, that dismissal was a mistake. Knowles was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer at age 39. She said the experience taught her the importance of listening to her body and speaking up when something doesn't feel right.
I Wanted My Doctor To Like Me, Then He Missed My Breast Cancer
"I wanted my doctor to like me," she said. "I think women, especially young women, are really used to being dismissed by their doctors."
Figuring out whether or not you actually have cancer based on possible symptoms is critical because early detection may help with treatment and outcomes. Seeking multiple opinions is one way to ensure you're getting the care and attention you need.
One thing to remember is that not all doctors are in agreement. Recommendations for further testing or treatment options can vary, and sometimes it's essential to talk with multiple medical professionals.
Learn more about SurvivorNet's rigorous medical review process.