Woman With Chest Pains Dismissed As Anxiety Gets Diagnosed With 204 Cancerous Lumps Due To Medullary Thyroid Cancer; What Is It?

A young woman’s chronic pain in the chest was dismissed as anxiety and was told by the doctors to do yoga and meditation to treat it. However, after almost two years of enduring discomfort, Saskia Clark underwent open-heart surgery to get a huge tumour along with 204 cancerous lumps removed from her chest after a proper diagnosis.

Doctors conducted a bilateral neck dissection to remove the lymph nodes, giving huge relief to the 24-year-old, who is now navigating life post-op and getting used to sporting red scars around her neck and down her sternum.

“Surprisingly, the scars don’t bother me at all,” Saskia, a social media manager based in Manchester, said on her TikTok account, detailing her entire ordeal. “I think your perspective changes after going through something like this—things feel way more real, and caring about my appearance is not something high on my list. I do feel though, as women especially, there’s so much focus and stigma on our appearance, especially after cancer, and especially now with social media and the younger generations wearing makeup as young as nine,” she said.

Saskia had to undergo a total thyroidectomy, a bilateral neck dissection for lymph node removal, and a sternotomy to remove tumour in her chest. Her intense treatment had followed a shocking cancer diagnosis last year, 18 months after she initially raised concerns about her health.

Saskia said she was always in good health, rarely drinking, never smoking, and exercising regularly when she started having occasional chest pain, which kept on becoming more serious. However, she had struggled with anxiety and fatigue in the past, so the doctors initially thought it was the same issue.

She was then told to try several wellness activities, including yoga, meditation, and acupuncture, to try and ease symptoms. Ultimately, a CT scan found the more sinister cause, and Saskia was diagnosed with medullary thyroid cancer.

“It’s taken me about 10 weeks to be anywhere close to feeling like I can manage little things alone, and even then, I have my off days. I can't go anywhere alone still, and I can't carry weight or be unaided in case of emergencies,” she said.

Medullary thyroid cancer or MTC, forms inside your thyroid gland, known as the medulla. It contains special cells called parafollicular C cells that make calcitonin, a hormone. According to experts, MTC happens when the C cells grow out of control.

It is an extremely rare form of cancer and approximately 4–10 per cent of all thyroid cancers are MTC. About 1,000 people receive an MTC diagnosis each year across the world.

Experts say at least 75 per cent of medullary thyroid cancer cases are sporadic, which means most people do not have a family history of this. Scientists have still not figured out the exact cause of sporadic MTC, but at least 40 per cent of those with this cancer have acquired mutations in the RET genes.

In up to 25 per cent of the cases, the cancer is due to an inherited condition known as multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2. There is also a subvariant of MEN2B known as familial medullary thyroid cancer. If you have the RET gene mutation, you may be able to get preventive surgery to remove your thyroid gland before cancer develops.

A few symptoms of medullary thyroid cancer include:

• A lump on the upper part of your thyroid gland
• Swollen lymph nodes in your neck
• Hoarseness in voice
• Difficulty swallowing
• Breathing issues

In some cases, people have MTC for a long time before they notice symptoms. This is because the tumour remains small.

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