A Fit, Healthy 22-Year-Old's Back Pain Was Blamed on New Office Job. Months Later, She Was Diagnosed with Blood Cancer
Lara Muller, a "fit and healthy" 22-year-old woman in England, was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, in June
Before her diagnosis, medical professionals blamed Muller's tiredness on being anemic, and her back pain on sitting down all day at her new office job
"I felt like I was going crazy. I knew there was something wrong with me and I was just getting worse but no one was hearing it," she saidA 22-year-old in England is speaking out about receiving a devastating diagnosis after doctors first told her she was likely just experiencing back pain due to having a new office job.
Lara Muller, from the town of Guildford in Surrey, England, first started having symptoms — including a sore neck and back while suffering a chest infection — in December 2024.
She had previously been a "fit and healthy" person in her early 20s, she told Kennedy News and Media, and tried multiple techniques to get her energy levels up, including drinking more coffee and taking vitamin supplements.
And after Muller booked herself an appointment with her doctor and went for a blood test, medical professionals blamed her tiredness on being anemic, and her back pain on sitting down all day at her new office job.
"I felt like I was going crazy," said Muller, who is a business development manager. "I knew there was something wrong with me and I was just getting worse but no one was hearing it."
Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human-interest stories.
Per a clip on her TikTok account, Muller explained how her general practitioner had told her "you're just anemic" when she complained about not feeling well.
After she coughed up blood following another chest infection in March, Muller went for an emergency X-ray and a CT scan, which confirmed she had a mass in her chest.
Muller — who has opened up about her cancer journey on TikTok — confirmed on the social-media platform that she underwent keyhole surgery and was eventually diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, which is a type of blood cancer. She received the diagnosis in June.
Per the Mayo Clinic, "Hodgkin lymphoma is a type of cancer that affects the lymphatic system. The lymphatic system is part of the body's germ-fighting and disease-fighting immune system."
"Hodgkin lymphoma begins when healthy cells in the lymphatic system change and grow out of control," the site adds.
PEOPLE is out to Muller for further comment.
Muller has since undergone chemotherapy, revealing on TikTok last week that she'd "got rid" of the disease in a month and a half.
She is keen to share her health journey to warn others of some of her symptoms that were previously overlooked.
"Now [that] I'm having treatment and I have solutions and answers, I feel 10 times better than I did when I was ill and not knowing what it was," she said. "But no one prepares you to hear that you have cancer at 22."
Muller continued of her symptoms, "I felt so tired all the time so I went to the doctors and they did my bloods and they put it down to [anemia]," explaining that doctors had initially tried increasing the dose of her iron tablets.
"I asked about the back and neck pain and they said as I'd started a new job and I sat down in a chair all day, it was probably to do with that. I went back two or three more times [to the doctor] because my symptoms got worse," she added.
Muller went on, "I've always been really fit and active and into sports and at my new job I'd sit down all day, so surely I wouldn't be getting that tired."
She added of getting checked out, "I went back to the doctors a third time as I started to get really dizzy and they told me it was down to the [anemia] again. I would walk 10 minutes up the road and I'd be so exhausted from it and I thought, 'This isn't right.' "
https://people-app.onelink.me/HNIa/kz7l4cuf
Muller said she ended up being "too exhausted" to go to the gym and had started to work out less, as well as found herself having to lift much lighter weights.
"I'd normally go four or five times a week and then I went down to once a week," she recalled. "There was a period of two months when I didn't go at all and I was losing weight."
Muller continued of now wanting to warn others of her symptoms, "I would say keep pushing if you think something is wrong with you. I should have just trusted my gut instincts more, as you know in your gut how you're feeling."
Read the original article on People
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNET
7 minutes ago
- CNET
New Study Shows Smartwatch Stress Sensors Have No Idea What They're Doing
You might want to think twice before you put a lot of stock in the latest stress charts from your fitness wearable. A recent study from the Netherlands' Leiden University, published in the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, has found that when smartwatches and similar devices record readings on stress, fatigue, or sleep, they're frequently getting it wrong. Researchers studied 800 young adults using the same Garmin Vivosmart 4 smartwatch model. They compared the data the smartwatches produced with the reports that the users created four times per day about how sleepy or stressed they were feeling. Lead author and associate professor Eiko Fried said the correlation between the wearable data and the user-created data was, "basically zero." A representative for Garmin did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Stressed or sex? Your watch doesn't know So why do wearables like fitness smartwatches get it so wrong? Their sensors are fairly limited in what they can do. Watches like these need to be worn correctly at all times (a loose or tight watch may give poor readings, for example), and they typically use basic information like pulse rate and movement to make guesses about health. Those guesses don't always reflect real-world scenarios. A wearable may identify high stress when the real cause of the change was a workout, excitement over good news, or sex. There are so many potential alternatives to stress or fatigue that the watches in the study never really got it right -- and the devices sometimes guessed the complete opposite emotional state from what users recorded. The Dutch study did note that Garmin's Body Battery readings, which specifically measure physical fatigue, were more reliable than stress indicators, but still inaccurate. And sleep sensing performed the best of them all, with Garmin watches showing a two-thirds chance of noting the differences between a good night's sleep and a bad one. It's also worth noting that smartwatch sensors can become more accurate as technology improves. It would be interesting to run a similar study with the much newer Garmin Vivosmart 5 to see if anything has improved, as well as see if other models like the latest versions of the Apple Watch have similar accuracy results.
Gizmodo
36 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
Doctors Were Worse at Spotting Cancer After Leaning on AI, Study Finds
Artificial intelligence tools have been shown to help doctors detect pre-cancerous growths in the colon—but don't even think about taking those tools away once you've introduced them. A new study published this week in The Lancet found that doctors who are given AI tools to assist with identifying potential cancer risks in patients get worse at making those same observations when they go back to doing it without AI's help. The study looked at four endoscopy centers in Poland, tracking the success rates of detecting colon cancer for three months before AI tools were introduced and three months after. Once AI was introduced, colonoscopies were randomly assigned to either receive AI support or not. The researchers found that doctors who gave colonoscopies without AI after having its assistance available saw their detection rates drop, producing outcomes 20% worse than what they were before AI was introduced. Making the results all the more troubling is the fact that the 19 doctors who participated in the study were all very experienced and had performed more than 2,000 colonoscopies each. If those doctors can fall prey to de-skilling, seeing their own abilities erode because of reliance on AI tools, the outcomes from inexperienced doctors could be even worse. There is little doubt that AI tools can help in medical settings. There have been numerous studies that suggest that AI can facilitate everything from the detection of cancers to the diagnosis of illnesses based on a patient's medical history. Analyzing information based on a whole wealth of previous examples is kinda the bread and butter of AI (you know, as opposed to generating braindead content slop), and there is evidence that suggests that humans can augment their own abilities by using AI tools. Studies in medical settings have found that doctors who use these tools can produce better outcomes for their patients. But no one, including doctors, is immune to the risk of shutting your brain off and relying on AI rather than their own skills. Earlier this year, Microsoft published a study that found knowledge workers who lean on AI stop thinking critically about the work they are doing and feel confident that the assistance from AI will be enough to get the job done. Researchers at MIT similarly found that relying on ChatGPT for essay writing resulted in less critical engagement with the material. In the long term, there's a real risk that reliance on AI will erode our ability to problem solve and reason, which is not ideal when AI continues to generate bad information. The American Medical Association found that about two in three physicians have already adopted AI to augment their abilities. Hopefully, they're still able to identify when it does something like hallucinating a body part that doesn't exist.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Heat health alerts extended into next week during fourth summer heatwave
Heat health alerts have been extended into next week for much of England following the fourth heatwave of the summer. The UK Health Security Agency said yellow warnings will now be in place in Yorkshire and Humber, the East and West Midlands, London, the South East and South West and East of England until 6pm on Monday, August 18. The warnings mean significant impacts on health and social care services are possible due to high temperatures, including a potential rise in deaths among the elderly or those with pre-existing health conditions. Alerts were previously due to end at 6pm on Wednesday.
