BEWARE

There are a lot of scary diseases in this world.  Take the lesser-known type of cancer that infiltrated my body for example – Neuroendocrine Cancer.  Not only is it scary but it’s also cunning, devious, misleading, and double-crossing. It likes nothing better than to play tricks on you.

It will grow in your body without you knowing.  It finds places to hide, mainly the small intestine, appendix, lungs, stomach, pancreas, rectum, and a host of other places. It can be fiendishly small to avoid being seen.  Once it’s established in the primary location (….or locations), it will try to break out via your blood and lymphatic systems.  It wants to establish other bases in your mesentery, your liver, your lymph nodes, your bones, and any other place it can get to.

It can often be uncannily quiet, not showing any symptoms. However, certain types will over-secrete hormones to add or introduce symptoms that mimic many other conditions such as IBS, asthma, abdominal upset, diarrhea, flushing. These are just more tricks up its sleeve, and they are very often signs of a hormonal syndrome caused by cancer. 

You will go to your doctor, perhaps many times, to report what looks like routine/regular symptoms. Unfortunately, it’s also really good at tricking your doctors. After several visits and despite your concerns, your doctors could become so frustrated that nothing serious is obvious, they might even start to think it’s all in your head. This is exactly what Neuroendocrine Cancer wants, it’s just getting started.

One particular type of Neuroendocrine Tumour (NET) has a wicked trick up its sleeve.  This one will over-secrete a hormone called Serotonin (amongst others) which can often cause fibrosis in your abdominal area, potentially leading to obstructions and damage to major organs and blood vessels.  It’s not finished though; it will also try to introduce fibrosis to the right side of your heart causing even more life-threatening issues. In addition to common symptoms of flushing and diarrhea, this type and others will also make you feel weak, fatigued, in pain, agitated, anxious, dizzy, nauseous, jaundiced, acid reflux, skin irritation, anaemic, lose weight and cause heart palpitations. 

It’s a real Witches Brew of symptoms and living with it is often not easy but its main trick is to prevent you from being correctly diagnosed and it’s pretty good at it.

However, it has a ‘finale’ trick.  Neuroendocrine Cancer actually wants to kill you, and if it’s left to plow its relentless path throughout your body, that’s exactly what it will do, slowly but surely.