Young Man Has Leg Amputated After Break Reveals Massive Tumor Doctors Missed for 3 Years
Have you ever known someone who has gotten a misdiagnosis from a doctor? It’s a terrible, discouraging thing when it happens.
One moment, you have some certainty and a game plan for your future, even if it’s not entirely encouraging. The next moment everything has gone topsy-turvy.
Twenty-year-old Matthew King from North Yorkshire, England, experienced just that. For three years, King suffered from unending agony in his right leg.
“I had excruciating pain,” he told Storytrender. “I’d spend nights after school lying awake in pain.”
“Often it was so bad I couldn’t get off the sofa, and I’d cry through the night because the pain was so intense. It was like having a dagger driven into my leg but the feeling lingered all day.”
Despite doctors examining him five separate times, they couldn’t find the problem. It seemed that Britain’s National Health Service had concluded that King was only dealing with a “muscle imbalance.”
But a single misstep would later reveal the seriousness of King’s health issues. According to GoFundMe campaign for King, he tripped while walking home with school friends in March last year.
No big deal, right? Well, not for King. Instead of simply embarrassing himself, he ended up breaking his leg.
Physicians examined him yet again — and this time they finally found something: a giant tumor.
King had cancer.
“My diagnosis didn’t really hit at first,” he recalled. “The doctors realized the tumor was three times the size of a normal tumor, almost the size of an orange.”
“When you’re told something like that, you can’t really register it. I spent nights crying myself to sleep as it was difficult to get your head round at first.”
King felt especially frustrated because he’d asked the doctors “if they could set up some scans so that they could be certain.” But the physicians just shrugged it off, saying that he didn’t need them.
He went through chemotherapy and also had his leg amputated during a 14-hour-long procedure.
His family is trying to raise £60,000 ($77,000 USD) to purchase a special programmable prosthetic leg for him. But no matter the outcome, King has decided to take it all in stride.
“There’s no point trying to hide it,” he said. “I’m proud of it and it’s part of me and what I’ve been through.”
His extremely difficult circumstances have also taught him a valuable lesson.
“What’s happened to me has made me look at life differently,” he said. “I want to live life, because now I know that anything can happen at any moment.”
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