05:33 PM
Tuesday 23 August 2022
I wrote – Yasmine El-Sawy:
A California girl had to receive chemotherapy for the rest of her life and will never be able to have a baby after being diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer that has already spread to other parts of her body, because doctors refused to scan her because of her young age.
The girl, Felicia Labonte, now 35, discovered a lump in her breast while she was at the cinema with her boyfriend in 2018.
Labonte went for an examination, and at first the ultrasound revealed a sebaceous cyst and nothing more, while the girl suspected that it was much worse, and asked for an x-ray, but the doctors refused it twice because she was only 29 years old at this time, i.e. Much lower than the average age of women being diagnosed with breast cancer.
The lump kept growing until it reached a point where she was unable to dress properly. Several months later, she went to the doctor again, at the age of thirty, and finally had an X-ray, but it was too late.
She was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer, and the tumor had also spread to the lung, lymph nodes and sternum at that point.
The cancer has begun to heal, but she will need to continue chemotherapy and hormone blockers throughout her life to prevent the tumor from coming back.
The 30-year-old also required her ovaries and fallopian tubes to be removed, which made her unable to have children permanently, contrary to what she had dreamed of all her life.
Labonte has had a round of chemotherapy with doxorubicin, which is called the “red devil,” because it turns a person’s urine and other fluids red, and is so powerful that it causes complete hair loss, nausea and vomiting, and possibly heart failure.
Labonte had six more rounds of chemotherapy using other drugs because of the disease.