Keeley Favell was 28 years old and living in Swansea, Wales, when her body began to change in ways no one could explain.
Since 2014, her abdomen had grown so slowly that she herself mistook it for weight gain. Strangers asked her when she was expecting her baby; she lied out of embarrassment, convinced that she was only gaining weight. She took pregnancy tests with her partner, Jamie Gibbins, and they all came back negative. Not even her general practitioner could explain it: after blood tests with no clear results, she ended up referring her to an obstetrician on suspicion of a high-risk pregnancy, without ever having examined her.
A routine ultrasound turned into an emergency CT scan, and that was when the truth emerged: a giant ovarian mass that required immediate surgery, with an incision from the sternum to the pelvis. In March 2017, what was supposed to last 90 minutes stretched into five hours in the operating room. Surgeons removed a benign 26-kilogram cyst, almost the weight of an eight-year-old child, something she herself called her “medical alien”.