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Doctors discovered a rare tumor in a New York man’s neck after he had a terrible case of the hiccups for five days straight.
The unidentified 35-year-old reportedly visited a New York hospital twice before doctors realized what was wrong with him.
While speaking with The Daily Mail, Dr. Mark Goldin, an internist at Long Island Jewish Medical Center, revealed that the patient’s persistence may have saved him from becoming paralyzed.
In the journal BMJ Case Reports, the doctor noted that the man suffered a severe case of the hiccups and vomiting for several days, but he was merely given the drug chlorpromazine and sent home.
By the time he showed up to the hospital for the third time, it became clear that something serious was causing the patient’s hiccups.
Aside from the hiccups and vomiting, the man had reportedly started experiencing trouble swallowing, weakness in his legs, and tingling in his left arm.
“That was the moment I really started thinking this is obviously something with a neurological basis,” Goldin said. “This was not your garden variety hiccups.”
An MRI proved Goldin’s suspicions right when the scan showed a large tumor growing on his neck, in the cervical spine.
Because the tumor seemed to appear out of nowhere, doctors strongly believed it had to be a hemangioblastoma.
Although the tumor was benign, Goldin says it could have caused serious damage if doctors hadn’t removed it before it had a chance to grow any further.
“If it continued to grow, it would have compressed the entire nerve roots in the spinal cord, and he would have been paralyzed,” he explained.
After what he went through, Goldin told The Daily Mail that the patient hoped his strange story would warn others that intractable hiccups are no laughing matter.
“The patient himself was very glad that this [report] would be promulgated to people because he thought it would be helpful to people with similar problems,” he said.
