CLL concerns 🤔

[__jessvr]

How did your doctor realized you were being diagnosed with CLL? What tests did he take? How did it all happened?

[Newdawn Administrator]

Jess, I realise you're anxious but I honestly don't think it will help this health anxiety to try and find answers on here. Doctors use a CBC for most patients to diagnose a host of illnesses including infection.

When we are afraid about our health, it's all too easy to try and find conditions that fit but your symptoms could be due to literally thousands more reasons. Most of them not cancer related.

At 20, it's almost unprecedented to have CLL. As I said in your other post, please discuss this with your doctor as a matter of urgency because I'm concerned that answers on here may just be fuelling your anxiety.

We wish you well but certainly don't want to give you information that you may wrongly interpret as relating to you. This has to be a matter for your physician now.

Newdawn

[Newdawn Administrator]

It also goes without saying that should you ever receive a diagnosis of CLL Jess, this community will support you wholeheartedly but please see your doctor again. Maybe a parent of family member could support you to find some much needed answers.

Newdawn

[AussieNeil Partner Administrator]

Hi Jess,

The average age of diagnosis for CLL is 72 and it is a common leukaemia. We have very few members with CLL under 40 in our nearly 3,000 strong membership, so for you to be diagnosed at your age would be amazing.

CLL is confirmed by a blood test called flow cytometry. Even though CLL is a 'common' blood cancer, it is still a rare cancer. I've had the test twice and each time the person taking my blood sample had to check whether it could be done via a blood sample and how to do it. When you consider that most tests would come back negative, I think you can appreciate that the odds of you having CLL are so very low that a doctor is going to find something far, far more common causing your symptoms.

You will make yourself sick with worry doing Internet searches trying to match your symptoms, so see your doctor.

Neil