One day I noticed a small bump on my left upper thigh. Because I live in the desert southwest, I thought maybe I'd been bitten by a spider. It didn't hurt, so I ignored it, but over the weeks that followed, it got bigger. I went to see my primary care physician when it was about the size of an egg, and again a couple weeks later when it felt more like the size of a grapefruit under my skin. During that time - and in fact since Sept. - I had been experiencing a chronic, persistent cough. My doctor decided this was due to a growing resistance to my blood-pressure medicine and switched it to another category. In hind-sight it seems very likely that this dry and constant cough was symptomatic of the presence of cancer, since that is common with staging cancers.
As for the bump on my leg, he referred me to a surgeon, who first had an ultra-sound done. The tissue looked normal - not a foreign mass - but inflamed. He thought it might be edema, but decided to remove the tissue at the end of November. This was done as an out-patient. When I went home it was with instructions about how to clean the wound and pack it with gauze every day. The opening on my skin was about the size of a fifty-cent piece, but the hole underneath it was much larger - he'd removed a 3" x 3" x 5" mass of tissue. Unfortunately we didn't learn until later that this tissue had not been sent to a lab for any follow-up biopsy, so nothing was learned at this point. There's no doubt in my mind, though, that this was the first evidence of my lymphoma.
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