NEED TO KNOW
- Brittne Largent put off going to the doctor for as long as she could, until her pain became unbearable
- A trip to her physician led to a leukemia diagnosis
- Now, she’s sharing her story on TikTok in hopes that others will take their pain seriously
Brittne Largent first noticed something was wrong when her right toe went numb in early January.
She didn’t “think anything of it at the time,” until the numbness turned to pain. Still, Largent just assumed she pulled a muscle at the gym and it was nothing to worry about.
“A few weeks after, I started having sciatica pain, and it started progressively getting worse,” the 30-year-old tells PEOPLE exclusively. “As a mom working full-time, our schedules get busy, and thinking it’ll get better, I tried to do stretches for sciatica, but nothing would work.”
As the weeks went on, her pain grew worse and worse.
“At nighttime, when I was trying to get ready for bed, it was excruciating pain going down from my lower back on my right side, and I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I was getting 30 minutes on and off. After two weeks, my husband took me to the ER, and they said it sounded like sciatica and sent me home.”
When nothing helped alleviate the pain, Largent decided to go to their family practitioner. She also asked the doctor to do blood work as she hadn’t had her yearly physical yet.
Once her blood work came back, the medical professional told Largent she needed to see an oncologist as soon as possible. From there, she underwent a bone marrow biopsy, which confirmed she had acute myeloid leukemia.
Largent says “never in a million years” would she have thought her symptoms could be cancer.
After her diagnosis, the process moved very quickly, and she began chemotherapy in late February.
“My oncologist, he’s amazing, and he was so confident, letting me know, ‘This is what we’re dealing with. This is our treatment plan, and let’s go,'” she shares. “So he was on top of it. I didn’t have to wait weeks to get treatment started.”
“When I found out, I didn’t even let myself cry at first. I thought, ‘Alright, let’s go. We need to go to the hospital. We need to get started,'” she continues. “It was reassuring that he was so confident in our game plan.”
Her first treatment was an induction round, meaning seven days straight of chemotherapy to eliminate as many cancer cells as possible.
She was in the hospital for three weeks afterward. Largent still gets treatment twice a month, with two weeks of treatment and recovery in the hospital and then two weeks at home.
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Largent says her “faith, family, and friends” have been helping her through this process.
“I have been very blessed with the family and friends that I have, the support that I have, and I have been building my faith a lot stronger,” she shares. “Since all of this has happened, my faith has grown significantly stronger.”
“I hope anyone else that’s going through anything like this, or anything medical, I hope they have a strong community behind them as well,” she adds.
Largent shared a video about her story on TikTok, which went viral, garnering over 760,000 views. She hopes to inspire others to listen to their bodies when something is wrong.
“I see trends, and I like to jump on them. I shared it to help at least one person who comes across it,” she says. “I want them to listen to their body because I was ignoring the toe numbness as if it were nothing.”
“Listen to your body and try not to skip your doctor’s appointments, especially your annual check-ups,” she continues. “If I had listened to my body when my toe first went numb, maybe I would have caught it a couple of weeks earlier than I did.”
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