Neck lump, mumps, ultrasound, needle aspiration & "no cancer"

When I first found out I had Hodgkin Lymphoma in January. I was devastated. I was only just 20, I was too young to have cancer surely?

In a strange way it was also a kind of relief. I hadn’t been well for quite a while; a lump appeared in my neck at the beginning of October some time and so I made a doctor’s appointment for the very next day. I was also feeling quite tired but thought that could have just been because I was burning the candle at both ends with the student life style. Initially I wasn’t too worried at that point cos I just thought it would be “one of them things” and it would just go on its own. I went to the doctor and he asked me about various others symptoms of which I may have had of which I had none and booked me in to take a blood sample. I remember him saying it could be mumps to which I laughed because I thought I would have had chipmunk cheeks if I had mumps!

A few blood tests later it came back that the mumps virus was found in my blood however after completing a swab test for the local health protection agency it came back that I had had mumps but not necessarily recently so I still had no idea why I had this lump. A few weeks on after going to the doctor each week for them to check on my neck, they were getting very concerned. I was referred to the hospital for an ultrasound on my neck. When I got to the hospital they scanned my neck and then my whole body. This scared me as I wasn’t expecting them to be looking at the rest of my body – could it really be something that serious? It turns out everything seemed fine but they wanted to do an needle aspiration on my neck. I burst into tears; I had been expecting having to have it done at some point but not there and then and I was beginning to get really fed up of not knowing what was wrong with me. They never really told me what they would be testing for so when I got a call off my GP later that week saying everything looked fine from the aspiration as there was no cancerous cells I was shocked then relieved. But still this didn’t explain why I had this persistent lump in my neck that was getting bigger.