Another perspective on your disease may help you find the best cancer care. By Stephen Ornes
In November 2012, when she was 52 years old, Shannon Semple was diagnosed with a disease she didn’t have. She credits getting a second opinion with savingher life .Semple, a physician assistant at a regional hospital in New Bern, North Carolina, had developed a persistent fever and highblood pressure . She spent a few days as a patient in the same hospital where she works, but her condition puzzled her doctors. They ultimately diagnosed her with a tick-borne illness. Antibiotics helped at first, but her symptoms returned.“I had an overwhelming sense of unwellness,” she recalls. Later, she would learn that blood tests failed to show any signs of tick-borne diseases. In January 2013, weighed down by uncertainty, Semple returned to work at the hospital. There, she examined the CT scan of her abdomen that her doctors had ordered and spotted a large lesion on one of her vertebrae. Her radiologist had dismissed it as benign. Additional tests performed later revealed a large mass in her chest, and that led her to go to the hospital at the University of North Carolina (UNC) in Chapel Hill, about three hours away from New Bern.
In November 2012, when she was 52 years old, Shannon Semple was diagnosed with a disease she didn’t have. She credits getting a second opinion with saving
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