A young woman who thought she was pregnant has received the shock of her life after finding out what was really in her stomach.
20yrs
old Alice Hall has revealed how she thought she was pregnant but was
then told she actually had a cancer tumour and that she would have to
give birth to the cancer. Say what?
According
to Metro UK, Alice Hall had been with her boyfriend, Christopher, for 9
months when she started feeling sick one morning last June and decided
to do a pregnancy test.
The test came back positive and a doctor later confirmed that she was four weeks ‘gone’.
Writing
in a piece for The Sunday Mirror, Alice said that though her and
Christopher were young, they were still thrilled and knew they’d step up
and become good parents when the time came.
They even came up with possible names.
But
just eight weeks in, Alice started bleeding so she was rushed to her
doctors, who then referred her to Hereford County Hospital for a scan.
Medics told her she was having a miscarriage but surprisingly, a pregnancy test confirmed that she was still pregnant.
She explained: ‘My uterus thought there was a baby in there as my body was mimicking the symptoms of pregnancy.’
Alice
returned the next day for more tests which revealed that she was indeed
pregnant and doctors said she probably just had a miscarriage scare.
But a week later, the pain returned.
The
20 year old said: ‘They thought I was having an ectopic pregnancy,
where the foetus grows inside the Fallopian tube instead of the womb, so
I underwent a keyhole laparoscopy so doctors could have a look around
inside.’
When they did though, they ruled out the possibility of
her being pregnant almost immediately but did not know what the
swelling in her womb was.
‘I felt relieved they didn’t think it
was an ectopic pregnancy but was devastated to learn that I wasn’t
pregnant any longer. It was so upsetting, my emotions had been
everywhere and I cried for the baby I’d lost’, she said.
After a few more tests, doctors diagnosed her with gestational tropho-blastic neoplasia (GTN), which had caused a tumour to grow in the womb.
Two weeks later, Alice
was taken for a chest X-ray and a full body MRI which showed there was a
tumour the size of a foetus in her uterus and a biopsy confirmed that
it was cancerous.
She was given eight sessions of a low-dose
chemotherapy which stopped the tumour from growing but things got worse
when she woke up in excruciating pain in September.
When she called her doctor, she was told that she was effectively in labour.
Alice
said: ‘I was taken to Hereford County Hospital and told I’d have to
give “birth” to the tumour, which weighed around one pound. It was
really traumatic.’
After 30 hours, she managed to remove the tumour on the toilet. Doctors say she’s doing fine.
Alice and Christopher plan to have a baby once she is fully recovered.