One morning roughly two years ago, Carpinterian Nik Thierjung was shaving when he noticed an odd lump on his neck.
Alarmed, he went to urgent care, and was immediately sent to the emergency room at Cottage Hospital. But there, they told he had nothing to worry about — a recent virus may have caused swollen lymph nodes, they said — so he went home.
Six months later, the lump hadn’t quite gone down, and last August, he noticed it was growing. He went back to urgent care, where the doctor diagnosed the lump as a cyst. It needed to be drained, they said, but they ordered tests to rule out anything more serious…