A woman who was diagnosed with a "one in a billion" form of cancer has opened up about the symptoms that her doctors missed.
Gianna Cericola was living her life like any other fitness-obsessed 20-something - hitting the gym, loving the outdoors, and working as a graphic designer - until everything flipped upside down.
The 28-year-old from Philadelphia started 2024 with what felt like standard UTI symptoms: a burning sensation when going to the bathroom and some strange stomach pain.
"The first kind of symptoms that I experienced were kind of like a UTI-related symptom, like a lot of burning when I went to the bathroom and just, like a lot of weird stomach pain in general,” she explained in an interview with YouTube channel The Patient Story.
Gianna headed to the ER where doctors performed an ultrasound, found nothing concerning, and sent her home.
“They didn't see anything… So they sent me home,” she said. “I would say about six months later, for those six months, I was totally fine, I felt normal, it was, like, really, really weird how the symptoms kind of just went away.”
But then things took a sharp and terrifying turn. She started randomly fainting, and it wasn’t a one-time event.
“Six months later, I just randomly started passing out - which never happened. Like, that's not normal for me.”
Despite several ER visits, doctors initially dismissed it as fatigue. But during one last ultrasound, they finally spotted it - an eight-centimeter mass in her abdominal cavity.
At first, doctors said it looked like a cyst on her ovary and told her there was "nothing to worry about."
Then things changed.
“They rushed me into surgery because the tumor started bleeding. So, I was passing out from just internal-bleeding in general,” Gianna said.
When she woke up from the emergency surgery, her world shattered.
“I came out of surgery and they told me that it was cancer but they don't know what kind of cancer it was,” she recalled.
“I waited about... it was like a really long time, I would say like a month for my diagnosis - they weren't really sure. It came back unclassified, and I was super scared.”
Eventually, doctors diagnosed her with desmoplastic small round cell tumor (DSRCT), a rare and aggressive form of sarcoma that has only been seen in about 200 people worldwide since it was first identified in 1989, per the Daily Mail.
Gianna was 27 when she received the news.
“It's such a rare kind of cancer, I heard it affects one in one billion people. So I was like, ‘I don't know how to feel about this’. It's kind of crazy.”
The disease, which typically hits young men between 20 and 30, presents vague symptoms like abdominal pain, constipation, a swollen belly, and unexplained weight loss - making it hard to detect.
The Cleveland Clinic reports a five-year survival rate of just 15% to 38%.
Gianna is now deep into a grueling seven-month chemotherapy regimen at Fox Chase Cancer Center.
“What that looks like is I'll be going to hospital for two days and then it's ten days out. The next cycle is in the hospital for five days, and then I have two weeks at home,” she said. “So that's what my chemo schedule looks like right now up until I think about like mid August.”
In between treatments, she’s coping with bone pain, hair loss, and an annoyingly constant runny nose caused by the chemo.
But she’s also doing everything she can to hold onto pieces of her life before cancer. She even completed IVF treatment to preserve her fertility in hopes of becoming a mom someday.
“My mindset at first was like, I was just so scared,” she said. “[I thought], is this the end? I don't know how much longer I have. But I feel like recently, like just focusing my mind on other things as much as I can, like, just helps so much.
“Putting my focus on other things just gives me so much more hope,” she added. “It's really important for me to share my story, just so other people that are going through this can see it and [have] hope. I feel like I want to, give as much people hope going through this as I can.”
To help cover her mounting medical expenses, Gianna launched a GoFundMe page.