When you are Hollie Thursby (28) after the birth of her second son, she indulged in a glass of wine, not knowing that she would experience one of the first symptoms deadly cancer. The wine caused a sharp pain in her throat and behind her earwhile she could drink beer without problems. At first, no one took the strange difference in her body’s reaction seriously, she writes
“I could drink prosecco and sometimes it hurt, sometimes it didn’t. I could have beer and it was fine, but wine hurt really, really bad.” she explained. The mother of two from England suffered at the same time intense itching of the legsespecially at night. “It was unbearable. I was scratching my blood,” describes.
She joined that extreme fatiguewhich she attributed to taking care of her children. Despite this, she visited a general practitioner. “He told me it was probably due to hormones,” she remembered. “I was unbearably tired, I needed to take a nap during the day, which is not very common,” she emphasized.
The turning point came only in July 2025when you she felt a lump on the left side of her neck. This was followed by examinations and a CT scan, which they revealed enlarged lymph nodes. A few months later came a terrifying diagnosis, Hodgkin’s lymphoma in the second stagea rare blood cancer.
After her diagnosis, experts confirmed that pain after drinking wine is a rare but well-known symptom of Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It is related to the acidity of alcohol, which can irritate the affected lymph nodes. “The doctor told me that in 17 years of practice she had seen it only once,” she remembered.
It was this strange signal, pain exclusively with wine, that was one of the first warnings. Hollie is currently undergoing chemotherapy. The hardest thing for her is not the physical side effects, but the fact that he is not able to fully care for his two sons. “My biggest fear is leaving them. I can’t leave the children without their mother,” he admits.
Her fear is all the stronger, isn’t it her own mother died of a blood disease. “My mom died when I was 10 from something called myelodysplasia, which is a blood disorder, a form of blood cancer. It’s too much of a coincidence that my mom had something like that and now I have this.” believes.
Hodgkin’s lymphoma affects most often young adults and seniors. Typical symptoms include painless enlarged nodes in the neck, armpit or groin, long-term itching of the skin, night sweats, unexplained fatigue, weight loss and pain after drinking alcohol (rare but significant).
A young mother today calls on others to they trusted their bodies and were persistenteven if the doctor does not take them seriously at first. “If you feel something is wrong, don’t be put off. It helped save my life.” says Hollie.
