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By Rachael O'Connor
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A car crash survivor has shared her story about how that crash ended up potentially saving her life.
Tracy Broomfield, 50 and from Metro Detroit in Michigan, was 34 years old when she was in the crash that saved her life.
On a couple's trip with her partner at the time, the pair were on a road trip through Montana, and after visiting Yellowstone National Park, were headed towards the west coast.
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But after hitting a patch of water in the road through bad weather, the car hydroplaned and crashed into the side of a mountain.
The couple both appeared fine, but, concerned about a pain in Broomfield's chest, they went to the hospital to be on the safe side.
Broomfield underwent a CT scan, where she was told that there were no visible internal injuries from the crash.
However, something else had been uncovered by the scan: a mass on her pancreas.
It turned out, Broomfield told Newsweek, to be a "solid pseudopapillary tumor of the pancreas."
These tumors are rare, accounting for between one and two percent of exocrine pancreatic tumors, and most patients have no symptoms when the tumor is diagnosed, according to a report from Radiopaedia.
Most are benign, but around 15 percent can be malignant.
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If it had gone undiagnosed, Broomfield said, "the surgeon had told me there was a chance the tumor could've become malignant at some point.
"But that with the specific tumor I had, simply removing it was the only treatment needed."
Despite being left with a scar on her stomach, and later developing diabetes because of missing half of her pancreas—the organ that controls blood sugar—she recovered from the surgery in under three months.
But while she feels "lucky," she admits that that time was "one of the most difficult periods of my life": the accident, the diagnosis and surgery—and the death of her father at the same time.
"I was expecting it, but still—the timing," she said.
"I just feel absolutely lucky that the car crash happened and that the tumor was found at all."
Broomfield shared the story in a post to her Threads account, @detroitinuk, sharing a photograph of the "gnarly scar" on her stomach and adding that "at least has an interesting story."
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