A young dancer who was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer at just 21 has revealed she initially brushed off the pain from a huge tumour as nothing more than a sports injury.
Phoebe Jablonski’s life was turned upside down after a routine scan uncovered advanced non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
The now 24-year-old had been suffering with severe shoulder pain, but put it down to a sports-related injury and carried on.
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For months, she lived in constant discomfort before her physio urged her to get it checked – a decision that led to a life-changing phone call.
“We were trying to determine what kind of sports injury it was – perhaps a torn rotator cuff or frozen shoulder,” Phoebe, from Sydney, Australia, told Need To Know.
“But after the scan, the doctor called and told me there was a 13.5cm tumour on my scapular.
“I was in a lot of shock and absolutely terrified.”
Despite the devastating news, Phoebe still went to work that same day before later telling her boss what doctors had found.
But as the pain worsened and began limiting her movement, she was eventually forced to stop working.
She said: “It was hard because I identified as a young and healthy girl – when I wasn’t anymore.”
Phoebe was formally diagnosed with stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in November 2023 and began treatment shortly after.
Although her overall journey, including recovery, has spanned three years, she was declared cancer-free after just eight months.
Before her diagnosis, Phoebe had endured nine months of worrying symptoms – including one unusual warning sign.
In a viral video viewed more than 1.5 million times, she revealed that even a single alcoholic drink would leave her in agony.
She said: “I would feel pain and aching across my whole body from the first drink.
“This lasted for several months before the diagnosis.
“I haven’t drank in nearly three years.”
Phoebe underwent six rounds of gruelling chemo immunotherapy – a battle she describes as both physically and mentally exhausting.
She said: “I felt very isolated and alone, and in disbelief for a long time.
“You have to have scans, biopsies and I was able to do fertility preservation.
“It was six rounds of chemo immunotherapy which successfully worked but there were lots of common chemo side effects.”
She suffered nausea, bone pain, mouth sores, extreme fatigue and hair loss, leaving her quality of life “very low”.
Phoebe said: “It was truly my family and friends that held me together until the end.”
Thankfully, the treatment worked and Phoebe has been in remission since the end of February 2024.
Looking back, she believes there were missed opportunities to catch her cancer earlier – and says she often felt “dismissed” when raising concerns.
One particularly alarming symptom was the appearance of hard lumps on her forehead, which doctors initially believed were harmless cysts.
Phoebe was told they were sebaceous cysts – but she was not convinced.
With a family history of the condition, she knew what to expect and said these lumps felt very different.
She later discovered they were in fact cancerous and had even shown up on her PET scan.
Phoebe said: “Because they were scanned, I didn’t think they could be so serious.
“But if I had followed it up further, I could have been diagnosed at stage one, two or three, rather than four.
“I’ve felt dismissed as a young person, a woman or a cancer patient.
“I feel at times I was discharged prematurely – and maybe if that was not the case, it may have been caught earlier.
“It definitely gave me a false sense of security, feeling like I had been checked by the hospital so many times.
“However, the cancer would have been very advanced already during that time and yet it went undetected each time.
“In the time I’ve been sharing my story, I’ve had plenty of people share that they’ve decided to get checked, take their symptoms more seriously or are encouraging someone they know.”
