COVID-19 may have saved her life.
A young woman from Minnesota learned she had a rare form of cancer — thanks to being diagnosed with the coronavirus.
Makenna Studer, who attends Mankato State University in the North Star State, said she got the virus in September and couldn’t shake feeling lousy.
“I kept getting worse and worse, and I had pretty much every symptom you could have,” Studer told local CBS-TV affiliate WCCO. “I was fainting and throwing up everything I was trying to eat.”
The college student’s fever soared to 105 degrees at one point, prompting a check-up by Dr. Colt Williams of the Mayo Clinic — who ran tests and discovered that Studer had acute leukemia.
“You can argue that with some twist of fate, the COVID-19 diagnosis was a blessing in disguise because it brought her into the health-care system, where she was able to be diagnosed very, very early in her disease course,’’ Williams told the station.
“She has some mutations in her leukemia that we see in only 1 percent of the 1 percent of patients, so we are talking only a handful of patients diagnosed in our country annually with the type of genetic alterations that we see in Makenna’s disease,’’ he said.
Studer said she was stunned by her diagnosis.
“It was like I had just been hit by a truck,” she said.
But the college student is “a fighter,” her mom says — and Studer, who has been undergoing chemo, remains hopeful.
“You just have to keep that perspective and mentality that every day is a blessing,” the young woman said.
