In December 2013, Hongkonger Katy Tong was a few days out from embarking on a trip of a lifetime – a year-long working holiday in Australia.
The event planner, then aged 28, had spent months sorting out a visa, planning an itinerary and working out what to pack.
Tong was excited about her adventure, but her mother, Lin, was less so. Call it mother’s intuition, but Lin could not shake the feeling that all was not right with her daughter.
A few months earlier, Tong, on her mother’s insistence, went for a doctor’s check-up after noticing a lump on the right side of her neck that she initially dismissed as fat.
“It was soft and fleshy but not painful, so I went to a general practitioner and was given some pills and sent home, thinking it was just swelling,” Tong says.
When the lump persisted, she visited a government hospital for tests. She was awaiting the results as she counted down to her departure for her dream trip down under.