Over the course of her medical career, Diana Cejas has worked with cancer patients and stroke victims. It’s to be expected — she is, after all, a doctor. But she has unique insight into what those patients experience. Cejas is a cancer and stroke survivor herself
Ever since she was a little girl growing up in the small town of Rougemont, North Carolina, Cejas knew she wanted to be a doctor. She earned degrees in biology and physics, a masters degree in public health, got her M.D. from The Howard University School of Medicine and did a residency in general pediatrics at Tulane University.
It was during her second year of residency that Cejas noticed a lump forming on the right side of her neck. She thought it might be a minor infection and took antibiotics, but they didn’t help. Her med school colleagues and doctors told her not to worry. “Med students are hypochondriacs,” she thought, but something didn’t feel right. Some days she was light headed and began getting bad headaches. She even fainted a couple of times. Eventually she pressed her primary physician for a CT scan.
The scan showed a carotid body paraganglioma — a rare type of tumor that forms near the carotid artery in the neck. In May of 2012, she had surgery to remove the tumor. “It wasn’t a thought that it could be cancer,” Cejas says. “It was a thought that I have this tumor and I have to get it out and I’m going to have this ugly scar and that’s the end of it.”
