'I started getting pains down my side - then I was diagnosed with an illness I'd never heard of and was practically out of options'
04.05.2023 - 16:49
/ manchestereveningnews.co.uk
A dad-of-four was terrified to receive a diagnosis he had never heard of, after multiple specialists struggled to pinpoint where the pains in one side of his body were coming from.
Chris Russell, a construction worker, spent nearly a year seeing specialist after specialist to find out what was wrong with him. He had first gone to his doctor after finding a lump on his shoulder.
Many tests and investigations later, the 54-year-old was told the lump was a secondary tumour, meaning he had cancer that had spread from where it first originated. But medics could not answer where the cancer actually came from.
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Chris was told he had cancer of the unknown primary (CUP) - a rare cancer with a poor prognosis, where doctors are unsure where exactly the cancer originates. Lack of research and funding into CUP has meant that outcomes for patients have traditionally been devastating – CUP makes up 2 per cent of cancer diagnoses but is the sixth most common cause of cancer death.
Prognosis is usually poor because without knowing the location of the original tumour, doctors can only give a combination of chemotherapy drugs used to treat a broad range of cancers. This was the case for Chris – the team at his local hospital told him that chemotherapy was his only option, but they didn’t know whether it would work.
There are no approved immunotherapies or targeted treatments for CUP outside of clinical trials.
“My diagnosis has been a rollercoaster,” said Chris. “I went from specialist to specialist to try and find out what was wrong. I then started to get really bad pains down one side of my body.
"They did another biopsy, and it came back as cancerous. When I