A woman says doctors 'fobbed her off' with antibiotics despite being so ill she couldn't get up stairs without gasping for air - only to later discover it was cancer. Sophie Zenonos first started experiencing symptoms including shortness of breath, fatigue, and a continuous cough in October 2019 and visited her GP.

The 28-year-old says she went to A&E in January 2020 as the symptoms persisted but says doctors 'fobbed her off' with antibiotics on three occasions saying she had a chest infection. Sophie says the breathlessness became so severe that she struggled to walk up a flight of stairs without taking a break - despite being active and working out at the gym three days a week.

After her symptoms failed to improve, and Sophie had a coughing fit so bad that she turned blue, she went back to the doctors in June 2020. The marketing officer was sent for an x-ray scan that month that revealed there was a six-inch by four-inch tumour in her chest and that she had stage four Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma.

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The marketing officer says she was left feeling 'frustrated' that the blood cancer diagnosis had been missed by doctors for so long. After undergoing chemotherapy and radiotherapy she was given the all-clear for blood cancer in May 2021, but is now battling thyroid cancer.

'Frustrated' by the late diagnosis, Sophie is now urging other people who think there's something wrong with their body to 'persevere' and push for a second opinion. Sophie, from near Basildon, Essex, said: "I first started experiencing symptoms towards the late end of 2019. I was just feeling generally unwell. The shortness of breath was the main symptom, I was really struggling to breath.

"I couldn't walk up a flight of stairs without needing to stop and take a minute, which for someone who was in the gym multiple times a week is quite unusual. I also had a continuous cough and general fatigue and tiredness.

"I went to my GP and I went to A&E twice as well, they gave me some antibiotics and told me that I had a chest infection."

After months of pushing for a diagnosis, Sophie was given the devastating diagnosis of stage four blood cancer in June 2020. Sophie said: "I was constantly fobbed off by the GP and by A&E, so it ended up taking around nine months to get my actual diagnosis.

"I ended up having a coughing fit to the point where I turned blue and my mum was like 'we need to get this sorted now'. I went to the GP and they sent me for a chest x-ray. The tumour was 15cm by 11cm in my chest, which is massive.

"It all just went from zero to one hundred after that. I got transferred from my local hospital straight to a specialist hospital in London, just because of my age and how large it [the tumour] was.

"I was frustrated that it had taken so long to get a diagnosis and as time went on a lot of anger did build up. I was shocked that it was something so serious and that it had taken so long to get to this point but I was also relieved as well because I had an answer."

Sophie underwent six rounds of chemotherapy and 20 sessions of radiotherapy between June 2020 and December 2020. In May 2021, she received the all-clear for blood cancer. But at the end of 2023 Sophie received more heartbreaking news when she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

Sophie said: "I had swollen lymph nodes in my neck for a while, which wouldn't go down. I thought maybe I was just run down or that I had a cold. They did a biopsy and told me there and then that it didn't look like lymphoma, but it looked like thyroid cancer.

"In February 2024 I had surgery to remove my thyroid and the surrounding lymph nodes in my neck where the cancer had spread to were removed as well. I'm at the point now where the lymph nodes are still cancerous because the treatment didn't remove it all.

"They aren't getting bigger so at the moment they're treating it as stable and the doctors are working out what the next steps are."

Sophie is now urging other people who have a 'gut feeling' that something is wrong with their body to seek a second opinion from doctors. Sophie said: "You've got to persevere with it. I'm so in tune with my body now that I know when any little thing is different or when something changes.

"If you're young and to the eye look kind of well and healthy but you've got that gut feeling that something could be wrong then you've got to seek that second opinion and persevere. Obviously the sooner you get diagnosed the better the outcome.

"I got diagnosed so late and now my quality of life isn't the greatest."

Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is a type of cancer that develops in the lymphatic system, a network of vessels and glands spread throughout your body. The most common symptom of non-Hodgkin lymphoma is a painless swelling in a lymph node, usually in the neck, armpit or groin. The main treatments are chemotherapy and radiotherapy.