It was just another day of classes for medical student Gabriella Barboza. She and her classmates were learning how to do head and neck physicals.
At one point, his teacher, Daniel Lichtenthaler, asked him to participate as a model for an exercise on how to perform a medical neck exam.
“They had already called other students. I got the part where he was going to explain the technique to palpate the thyroid,” recalls Gabriella, who lives in São Paulo, Brazil.
As the teacher demonstrated in front of the class, the student sensed something different in his reaction.
“I think he was afraid to speak at the time, but I noticed that something did not seem normal to him,” says the young woman. At the end of class, she questioned the teacher. “I asked him if he had noticed anything different as he felt my neck, and he said, ‘There’s something there, take a look.'”
After that alert from his teacher, he underwent medical tests and was diagnosed with a type of thyroid cancer.
She describes that class, in mid-October 2020, as a turning point for her health.
“If I hadn’t gone to class that day, maybe they wouldn’t have discovered the disease so soon. My diagnosis would have taken much longer and might have been more serious,” says the student, who is now 22 years old.
“My world collapsed”
The young woman, who was in her third semester of medicine, assures that she had no symptoms, much less had she noticed any kind of change in her neck.
Lichtenthaler, who is a specialist in geriatrics and internal medicine, told BBC News Brazil that he noticed that the student’s thyroid had a significant and asymmetrical increase. This reason led him to call the young woman to use her as a model in the technical demonstration.
“The first student used as an example had a small thyroid, which is normal. So I quickly looked at other students’ necks and Gabriella’s caught my eye,” says the doctor.
He noted the enlargement of the gland when he touched the girl’s thyroid. “We were lucky that she presented the anatomical abnormality right in the head and neck exam class,” says Lichtenthaler.
The teacher’s suggestion at the end of class that she go see a doctor to find out what was behind this disturbance surprised and intrigued Gabriella.
“I’ve always been a very healthy person. I had medical tests done a month before, but they didn’t identify anything abnormal,” she says.
The day following class, she went to see a gynecologist. “He evaluated, he told me that there was something (unusual) and that it was better to investigate.” And she underwent various tests the following week.
At the end of October, he was diagnosed with papillary thyroid carcinoma.
“When I found out, my world collapsed. I kept thinking: I’m too young to face this. I cried a lot and I didn’t want to believe it. It’s a moment when you see that things can end,” says Gabriella.
Thyroid nodules are considered common and are often easily identified due to the prominent location of the gland, in the central area of the neck. In many cases, according to doctors, the patient himself can feel this difference by touching this region of the body.
positive outlook
The good news is that regarding 95% of these lumps are benign. And if the patient is diagnosed with cancer, the chances of curing the disease in this region are very high, there are studies that estimate that regarding 97% of cases have positive results.
The orientation of the specialists is that patients go to a doctor if they notice any changes in this area. The earlier there is a diagnosis, the greater the chances of a cure and the fewer invasive procedures to combat the health problem.
According to the National Cancer Institute of Brazil (INCA), thyroid cancer is the most common in the head and neck region.
The Mayo Clinic in the US says that it is not known exactly what causes thyroid cancer, so there is no way to prevent it.
Studies indicate that the disease affects three times more women than men.
The most common thyroid cancer is papillary carcinoma, as in Gabriella’s case. It usually develops slowly but can progress to other areas of the neck. According to experts, treatment is usually successful and there are few records of deaths.
By the time Gabriella’s cancer was discovered, the disease had already progressed and had spread to other areas of her neck as well as part of her oesophagus.
However, the doctors’ expectations were still very positive regarding the young woman’s recovery, since it is a cancer with a very high recovery rate.
But even with this positive outlook, the student was very worried.
“Because I wasn’t very informed at the time, I thought it might be the worst case scenario. When I saw that it had spread to other parts, I thought it would have spread everywhere. I felt like my life was hanging by a thread,” she says. Gabriella.
“Renovation”
At the beginning of November 2020, Gabriella started the procedures to treat the disease in a hospital in São Paulo. Her first step was surgery to remove her thyroid and the tumor mass that had spread to other parts of her neck.
In January 2021, she had an iodine therapy session, a procedure indicated for this type of cancer in which the patient takes a drug with iodine to combat the remains of the disease in the body.
The treatment was a success and the doctors released him in February 2021, as there were no more signs of the disease in his body.
Because it is cancer, you need regular follow-up through tests to assess your health. It is currently undergoing semi-annual evaluations. No further evidence of the disease was found.
Upon learning of her healing, the student shared the news on Instagram: “After months of struggle, I want to record this extraordinary moment in my life, which made me a better person and made me see the world in a different way,” she wrote in your profile on the social network.
“I was reborn. And now a new cycle begins,” he concluded. In the comments, many people celebrated her recovery.
Gabriella, who is currently in the middle of her medical career, says that the teacher’s warning during class and the cancer treatment period were great learning moments.
“I always wanted to be a doctor to take care of others and heal people, regardless of the specialty. But following what I went through as a patient, I think the perspective changes,” he says.
She points out that during treatment she discovered that the cancer had appeared long before the professor’s observation, but was not identified by any of the doctors with whom she had previously had routine consultations.
The student says that she learned the importance of paying attention to every detail of the patient, in addition to listening to everything she says. “Everything I experienced changed my history with medicine and made me grow not only personally, but also professionally,” she says.
Professor Daniel Lichtenthaler says he was surprised and worried to learn that what he noticed on the girl’s neck was a sign of cancer, “but following learning that the treatment had been successful, I was very happy.”
Now you can receive notifications from BBC World. Download the new version of our app and activate it so you don’t miss out on our best content.
BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-61348354, IMPORTING DATE: 2022-05-06 12:30:05
