Once you get a good look at enough of them, it will eventually become clear that the human body is full of surprises .
But while some rare or unexpected conditions become obvious at birth, others can lie dormant for years until they suddenly start affecting your life . And in some cases, these bodily surprises can feel a lot like an appendix in that we only have reason to pay them any mind when something is wrong with them.
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This exact phenomenon is why one woman has recently made it her mission to warn others about what can come from a seemingly innocuous abdominal bump that some women have noticed.
On July 10, 23-year-old Kayley Reese uploaded a TikTok responding to another woman who showed viewers her stomach bump.
She said that this bump is always present — including when she tries to suck it in — but that it’s always just been a normal part of her life.
According to Reese’s video, the comments seemed to report similarly “normal” bumps, which she also noticed on social media when she became curious about her own bump.
However, these reassurances would end up misleading her, which is why she is now stressing that “it’s not always completely normal.”
Because in the year since she first noticed it, Reese’s bump kept growing as if she was pregnant.
As she told Good Morning America, this growth was accompanied by nausea, dizziness, shortness of breath, and painful urination by June of this year.
That led her to seek medical attention, which revealed that her bump was actually a seven-pound cyst with fluid building up inside of it all along.
And while this would probably be shocking enough on its own, that cyst had some serious implications for her health.
Although Good Morning America reported this was not technically an ovarian cyst because it wasn’t actually attached to her ovary, it formed close enough to it to put the organ at serious risk.
As Reese said in her TikTok, “It had the potential to become cancer and lose both my ovaries.”
Indeed, doctors warned her that they would likely have to remove one of her ovaries and a Fallopian tube during the surgery to extract the cyst.
Fortunately, she wouldn’t end up losing anything but the cyst. However, that was down to sheer luck.
So when she saw the clip at the beginning of her video and the comments left under that clip, she knew she had to upload her own warning to get these bumps examined.
As she put it, “I feel like if I had seen my own TikTok, I would have gone to the doctor a lot earlier.”
h/t: Good Morning America
