Oklahoma Woman Thought She Pulled a Muscle. Then the Nurse at the ER Told Her They Found a Mass on Her Rib
She had more going on than just a pulled muscle.
After experiencing chest pain, Alexis Mullen (@llexilovee) went to the emergency room for a second time. She waited for hours, then she received an unexpected diagnosis at the age of 23.
“I was a restaurant manager. I loved my job,” Mullen told TikTok. She shared that she lived in a spacious home and had two cars. As Mullen put it, life was looking up for her and her two children. But while she was at work one day, she started feeling pain in her rib. She rationalized it, thinking that the pain must have come from all the medications she received from her epidural, because the pain traveled from her back to her side.
Mullen said she normally pushed through pain. But when she had someone help and stretch her arm, the pain escalated. She said, “After an hour, I was in the office, crying, and I don’t cry. I have a really, really high pain tolerance.”
The pain had gotten so bad that her coworkers had to call the ambulance, even though the hospital was only three minutes away. Mullen said she could have driven herself but didn’t want to risk it because of the intense pain she was feeling at the time. But to make matters worse, Mullen said she felt unwelcome by the dispatch team at the ambulance.
“I felt like the people at the ambulance thought I was just trying to get out of work, and that was not the case at all,” Mullen claimed. Downplaying a patient’s pain can have lethal consequences, as this EMS paramedic would know. Regardless, Mullen made it to the emergency room, and the doctors took her in for an X-ray.
Just a pulled muscle
Mullen said she was also given morphine, and after 30 minutes, the medication started kicking in. The professionals later talked to Mullen about their findings.
“They told me I pulled a muscle,” Mullen said. However, she also claimed that the hospital did not conduct a CT scan on her. Nevertheless, the explanation made sense to Mullen at the time because she used to work out. In the end, she was given ibuprofen and told to take two days off from work. She continued with business as usual, and Mullen believed she had no major issue, just a pulled muscle.
But when February came, Mullen started feeling the pain in her rib again. She said that it had turned into an excruciating pain that Mullen could no longer ignore.
A diagnosis that came out of left field
“My chest is heavy, I don’t even know if I’m going to make it, but I’ve got to get to the hospital,” Mullen said. She got to the hospital at midnight, and this time, they gave her a CT scan. Mullen thought she was going to receive pain medication again before being sent home. Instead, she waited for the results until a nurse came to her at four in the morning.
“I know this is not what you want to hear, but you have a mass on your rib,” the nurse supposedly said. Mullen asked for the nurse to elaborate, and she was told that the mass could “potentially be cancer.” Later in the night, Mullen said she was given a biopsy exam the next day.
“I had thought I pulled a muscle, and now you’re telling me I have cancer?” She reacted when the doctor asked her about her feelings regarding the potentially cancerous mass. Mullen said around four weeks went by before she received the results of her biopsy.
She was at work at the office with her boss. Mullen asked her boss to open the chart, and they found out she had Ewing sarcoma. She had already asked her aunts in healthcare, so Mullen knew this was a possibility.
“I just went about my day, working,” Mullen said. But the situation quickly evolved, and a week after her diagnosis, she was admitted to the ICU for her chest pains. She is now going through chemotherapy and has set up a GoFundMe dedicated to her battle against cancer.
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