I Went to the ER with an Anxiety Attack Before College Finals. The Same Day, Doctors Found Pancreatic Cancer (Exclusive)

Toni Bravo, 21, thought he had an anxiety attack a few weeks before the finals at Notre Dame University in December 2023. She went to an ambulance and was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the same day. Last summer, she had surgery to remove the tumor, and now she is without cancer and has ended her older year. Below, she shares her story with people to immediately encourage others to go to the doctor if something is wrong.

In the fall of 2023. I began to develop anxiety. I was junior at Notre Dame University and I never had anxiety before.

For a few months, I had high heartbeat and tight chest. My heart rate would be really fast and I would have trouble breathing regularly. When I talked to my mother about it, she said it was the time when she was younger that she was also engaged in anxiety, and then after a year or two it disappeared. So I just thought it was normal.

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But one day in December 2023, about two weeks before the finals, I had a really bad attack by anxiety. It started the night before and passed by the next day, which never happened. Usually, if I had anxiety at night, once I went to sleep and wake up in the morning, it would disappear.

But this time I woke up, anxiety was still enhanced. Just walking 10 steps to the bathroom would increase my heart rate to a point where I really was embarrassed. I called my mom and I said, “I can’t get rid of my anxiety today. I don’t know what’s going on.” She said, “Well, if you feel better, and probably will, you should just go to an ambulance. They will help you calm down, tell you you are fine, give you some scanning, and then I hope you will be good . “So I listened to her and I took an ambulance at the hospital near the campus that day.

They brought me really fast and they are like, “Okay, your heart beats are obviously elevated, but we’ll make a CT scanning of your chest just to make sure nothing blocks your heart, no clots, anything.” After they started the initial CT scan, they came back and said that one of the radiologists saw something at the very bottom of the scan. They ordered CT scanning my belly.

I was alone in the hospital when the doctor came in to tell me the results. He was like, “I don’t really know much about it, because it looks rarely from what I watched about it, but you have cancer.” I was 20 years old. [Her birthday is March 27, 2003.]

His accurate words were, “It’s a really rare tumor on your pancreas.” He said he had not seen him in his career before, but that I would have to get the surgery to remove him. You would have to return home to California to achieve this. ”

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I took my finals, I went home to Los Angeles for a winter break. During the break, I had my first meeting at City of Hope. I got my CT scan and I met my surgeon Dr. Laleh Melstr, who confirmed the diagnosis. She told me, “There is a rare tumor on the pancreas. She is treated with surgery, there is no other way to heal. This is very well behaved – once you pull it out, it remains pretty much disappeared.”

Much of my stress relieved when I knew that once I had surgery, I should be finished statistically. That helped me calm down around the whole diagnosis. Dr. Melstrom was very, very flexible with the time of my surgery.

She said, “Do you want to graduate from college before we do or would you like to finish this this summer?” I was so focused on pulling it out of my body. I was like, “No, the fastest thing I can wash, I want to come to surgery.” Because that was weird – to know and be aware of it in my body.

I ended up through the spring semester of my junior year with a tumor. In May I got out of school and spent a month preparing for surgery. I hung out with my friends, I went to swim, I went to the beach, I went to Disneyland, I did all that I loved to do that I knew would not be so easy to do after surgery. I went on a trip for a weekend with my friends to Big Sur. I went to Vegas. I knew I would be in bed after surgery.

I had a robot surgery of Whipple on June 4, 2024. The procedure of the robotic Whipple involves removing the pancreatic head, part of the small intestine, gallbladder and gallbladder. Robotic surgery allows for a smaller cut and faster recovery.

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24 hours before the surgery, they were probably the most demanding for me. The night before, I was full of emotions. I didn’t show it to anyone, but at night before I went to sleep, I started crying because I was scared. I knew I was in very reliable and good hands, but everything can happen at any time. And my surgery was a major surgery and a long surgery.

I remember praying that if I didn’t do surgery, it was supposed to be. And if I succeeded in surgery, then I knew I was intended for something better and something big in my life. I feel that these difficult times are closer to your faith. So I prayed a lot and told God that in any case, whatever happened.

After surgery, I was in the hospital for about a week. I underestimated how hardcore recovery will be. Physical therapy for me was a big deal. After surgery, I had a lot of pain in the lower abdomen and where the surgery was performed. So I made sure to get out of bed, walk and build my endurance.

The kindness of Toni lock

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Much of the Whipple Procedure is nutrition. My gallbladder has also been taken out, so you change your diet a lot. I try to eat really clean, high protein and low fat foods. I can’t even eat fried foods. The dietarie helped me understand the new way I had to learn to eat.

I was in the hospital for seven days, and then I went home for about four days. And I was trying to increase food intake probably faster than I needed, and my stomach wasn’t ready. So I had to go back to the city of hope and stayed for another four days. They just wanted to make sure I digest food properly. Then I managed to go home forever.

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I only had to have surgery, I didn’t have to have chemotherapy – which I am forever grateful for.

I don’t know why I got this cancer. No one ever had pancreatic cancer in my family. Indeed, cancer is not even a matter in my family. Only one person except me had cancer, and that was breast cancer. That’s just a really rare thing. When I looked at him, I learned that my diagnosis was more common in minority communities. So maybe that’s why – I’m a Mexican, I’m Latin on both sides.

As new cancer information came out, younger people are diagnosed. The age range that people get cancer becomes younger and we need to have a way to find out. Because of this, it is super important for early detection tests for pancreatic cancer.

Recently, City of Hope received a gift from Emmeta and Tesse Stephenson for $ 150 million for further pancreas research, I was delighted to hear about it, it was shortly after my surgery. So I feel like this will only go to more people and I hope that early detection tests will be created.

The kindness of Toni lock

Another really big thing for me because I had cancer speaks to my close friends, “Please, please, if you ever feel like something is wrong, go to the doctor.” I don’t want them to reject if they ever feel like something is wrong because I care about my friends.

I was lucky that I decided to take an ambulance that day because of my anxiety. Otherwise, I don’t know when doctors found him. And potentially, I would have the same happiness that many patients with pancreatic cancer has: they catch it late and harder to deal with it.

The kindness of Toni lock

As far as anxiety is concerned, this is something that I truly believe that my body was trying to tell me that something was wrong and I had to go to check. Because of this, I always say, you should listen to your body, your body knows when something is wrong. Since I was disappeared after I was diagnosed, the anxiety was just gone, I hadn’t had an episode of anxiety since then.

After the surgery was performed, they made a biopsy of the tumor, and I caught it so early that there were no active cancer cells in it, which was great. I’m without cancer, which is amazing. For the next few years, I get CT scan every six months, just making sure that nothing changes and to stay the same, as I am currently: healthy.

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Source: HIS Education