Jillion Potter, the leader of the U.S. women’s rugby team, found she had cancer after her neck and mouth became swollen. Here’s exactly what you have to know.
Rugby user Jillion Potter’s road to the Olympics has actually been anything yet easy. Potter, 29, has actually beaten a broken neck and cancer to become the leader of the USA rugby sevens group (“sevens” refers to the type of rugby fulfill that has actually seven users on each group rather than 15). In the most recent Lenny newsletter, Potter discusses discovering she had cancer in 2014, along along with her seemingly innocent symptoms.
“I woke up one morning and had swelling underneath my jaw and [the front of my mouth] area,” she says. “I believed my immune system was down, or maybe I was sick.” Potter took antibiotics, yet the swelling didn’t go away—it merely got worse. “Finally, we did an MRI and an ultrasound and located a tumor in my jaw,” she says.
Doctors originally believed the tumor was benign, yet they later found it was a Stage 3 synovial sarcoma, a soft tissue cancer that usually occurs near the joints of a person’s arm, neck, or leg. “Due to the tumor size, and Due to the rarity of the cancer, I started treatment rather fast,” she says. “There was no food digestion period. It was like: You have to begin chemo right away, and this is going to be the regimen.” Potter is now done along with her cancer treatment and says her healthiness is spine in fantastic shape.
It’s natural to write off a little swelling in your neck or face as a symptom of a sore throat or cold, love Potter did. So, exactly how are you supposed to already know if it’s something much more serious?
The big difference is that swelling in the face or neck caused by cancer usually isn’t painful as soon as you touch it, Homayoon Sanati, M.D., medical oncologist and medical director of the MemorialCare Breast Focus at California’s Orange Coast Memorial Medical Center, tells SELF. “as soon as you have actually an infection, the swollen lymph nodes are usually rather tender,” he says. “along with cancer, the lymph nodes are usually rather mildly tender, if at all.”
While Potter’s form of cancer is rare, Michael Kane, M.D., the medical director of Community Oncology Services for Chilton and Newton Medical Centers, tells SELF that swelling in the neck and face can easily be caused by cancers love Hodgkins or non-Hodgkins lymphoma, or a cancer that’s starting in the mouth, tongue, tonsils, or spine of the throat. “That induces localized swelling and could spread to the lymph nodes on one or the two sides of the neck,” he says.
Facial swelling can easily likewise be a authorize of lung cancer, Sanati says, Since a tumor might be pressing on a large blood vessel that goes from the lungs to the heart, affecting drainage in your body. “That’s a severe problem that calls for focus right away,” he says.
But Dale Shepard, M.D., Ph.D., a medical oncologist at the Cleveland Clinic Cancer Focus that specializes in treating sarcomas, tells SELF that while facial swelling can easily be a authorize of cancer, that link is quite uncommon. “While it is constantly necessary to rule out severe induces of symptoms, facial swelling is far much more most likely to be from an infection compared to cancer,” he says.
Basically, if your face or neck comes to be swollen and you’re an otherwise healthy, young person, you shouldn’t freak out and assume it’s cancer. Instead, Kane recommends seeing your primary care physician and obtaining treated appropriately—it could be a sore throat or various other infection that can easily be cleared up along with antibiotics.
But if you’re provided the right treatment for an infection and symptoms persist, Shepard says it’s a great tip to have actually your doctor look in to it further. “The requirement for follow-up is most important due to the fact that symptoms not controlled by an first therapy are most most likely to have actually a much more severe cause, or at the rather least, require added treatment,” he says. Either way, your doctor can easily walk you through your options.
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