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You’re living the good life—eating right, exercising, maintaining a healthy weight—doing all the recommended things to maintain a healthy and productive lifestyle. Then, Bam! Your health care provider convinces you that you should do a screening test for cancer during a minor surgical procedure. You protest because you feel great—never better—but you finally agree. You take the test, fully expecting to walk out with totally negative results and a clean bill of health. Then the hammer falls—the doctor bluntly says, “You have a tumor and you need to schedule surgery as soon as possible to remove the tumor and part of the affected organ”. This is surreal—you have no symptoms and you feel great. The surgery goes smoothly and you go home in only 2 days, a record for this kind of surgery. You don’t even have any real pain. The doc says all went extremely well, and the tumor appears to be contained but the pathology results are necessary to confirm the success of the procedure. Then you receive another unexpected blow—the microscopic examination says the tumor has invaded the lymph nodes and you will have to have chemotherapy. You feel like your world has turned upside down and is spinning out of control. How and why could this possibly happen?
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Bode et al. (2017) studied this question.