A woman who was so exhausted she could barely get through her day – but whose blood tests all came back “normal” – was shocked when she finally received her horror diagnosis.
When Selena Favaro began experiencing unexplained symptoms such as hair loss, severe fatigue and bruising, she quickly grew concerned.
The 24-year-old also started noticing weight fluctuations in her body.
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She went to the doctor on several occasions – but each time, tests came back negative.
“I was exhausted all the time,” Selena told Need To Know.
“I would sleep up to 10 hours and still be tired when I woke up, have three coffees before midday, and still need to nap on my break to be able to make it through the afternoon.
“After work, I’d shower and then head straight to bed.
“I also had really bad hair loss – anytime I washed my hair it would come out in chunks – and had lots of random bruising on my legs.
“At first, I was just confused and questioning whether I was doing something wrong – the fatigue was the most debilitating part.
“It made it hard to do anything, especially working, and made me look at myself differently and question whether I was just lazy or if something was really wrong.
“It also made socialising difficult because I always felt too tired to hang around my friends or my partner.
“I was worried they were going to think I was boring or uninterested in what they were doing, but in reality it was out of my control.”
Soon, an unmistakeable sign that something was seriously wrong appeared: a lump on Selena’s neck, which she discovered one evening, while doing her skincare.
Her GP referred her for an ultrasound just days later, where the sonographer allegedly said they had“seen sinister” cases before and that it was “nothing to worry about”.
This made the results even more shocking for young Selena.
Just 11 days later, she was referred for an urgent needly biopsy, which revealed that she had papillary thyroid carcinoma.
She said: “I felt like I already knew what was coming.
“I thought that might help with actually finding out but it didn’t really soften the blow.
“I’d asked my mum to take the afternoon off work and come to the doctor with me because I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be good news.
“But once we got there I told her to wait outside and I’d just tell her what the doctor said – huge mistake.
“As soon as I found out, that hot, panicked, tunnel vision feeling came on and I couldn’t hear a word the doctor was saying.
“I ended up telling him to bring my mum into the room because I stopped thinking that I’d actually be able to tell her myself.”
Selena, a physiotherapist who lives in Sydney, Australia, was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in August 2025, just three weeks after her 24th birthday.
Selena was rushed into surgery the very next day to remove the 3.8cm nodule in her neck, which the surgeon told her had “probably been growing for about three- four years” without her knowing.
She said: “The main thing I found with this whole experience is almost like having this sense of ‘cancer imposter syndrome’.
“At first I was so upset about my diagnosis and felt that I should stop complaining and feeling sorry for myself because other people have it worse.
“But then I realised that at the end of the day, cancer is cancer, and just because what I have isn’t as bad as what somebody else may be going through, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t hard.”
Another ultrasound and biopsy confirmed that the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes.
In September, Selena underwent a total thyroidectomy and left neck dissection to remove the entire thyroid and nine affected lymph nodes.
She said: “The sad and scared emotions didn’t really hit me until I went for further testing and found that the cancer had spread to my lymph nodes.
“The only tears I really had was thinking about how I was going to tell my boyfriend and my friends.”
Selena credits the people in her life for helping her get through the surgeries and treatments.
She said: “As much as this was my experience, it was something that we all struggled through together.
“This had just as much of an effect on them as it did on me, and every single person did their best not to show it, and to just be there to show me so much love and care.
“I don’t think I would have gotten through it with as positive of an outlook without them.”
Now, Selena us doing much better – but she’ll know more in the new year, when she has follow-up scans and tests to determine her prognosis.
She added; “Physically, I am feeling really good, I have fully recovered from surgery and am back to pretty much normal life.
“However, I don’t have my follow up appointment until mid-January where I get my scan and blood test results to see if this whole thing is hopefully over.”
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