A woman was shocked after doctors found she had an enormous growth in her stomach, after she started gaining weight and couldn’t work out why.

Abi Chadwick, 19, went from a size 12 to a size 18 in just a few months and carried most of her weight around her stomach.

Abi, who is from Cannock, Staffordshire, went on a diet and lost a stone, but she couldn’t shift the bulge from her protruding stomach.

She desperately try to slim down when people started to tell her she looked nine months pregnant, but she started to feel full and sick after eating just a piece of toast.

‘My stomach was rock hard and when I used to go out to the shops people used to tell me I looked nine months pregnant,’ says Abi.

‘It made me feel bad because I couldn’t lose the weight even though I wanted to. I was relieved when I was told it was a cyst the size of a football. I just wanted it gone.’

When she started experiencing sharp pain in her stomach in March 2021, doctors finally discovered she had a 13-inch cyst in her abdomen.

Terrified Abi had the mass removed two weeks later at Walsall Manor Hospital, West Midlands, on 13 April 2021 before it ruptured.

‘Every time I had two mouthfuls of toast I would be absolutely stuffed – I couldn’t figure out why,’ she recalls.

‘I couldn’t eat anymore so that really took its toll. People kept telling me I was pregnant, and I thought it was just because I was fat and there was nothing I could do so I brushed it off.’

After experiencing severe pain in her stomach, Abi knew she had to get medical help.

‘I had what felt like a stitch in my right side and it was agony,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t really walk or bend over.

‘I went to work, and they thought I had a UTI but everything was normal after I got tested.

‘The pain didn’t stop so I went to A&E and they thought it was appendicitis or kidney stones.

‘But after getting checked over again they couldn’t find anything, I didn’t know what to do.’

Doctors finally scanned Abi’s abdomen and were shocked to find a huge cyst sitting in her stomach.

‘I couldn’t believe it when they told me,’ says Abi. ‘They said I had cyst in my abdomen which needed to be removed.

‘I was probably born with it and it just grew and grew and I never knew. If I had left it and it ruptured it could have been really bad.

‘I always had a bit of a pudge underneath my belly, but I thought that was just the way I was. Looking back now, I don’t know how I didn’t notice that something was up.’

Abi says she was incredibly relieved to finally have the cyst removed earlier this year.

‘I feel like myself again,’ she says. ‘I’m yet to see anyone that’s had one that big.

‘I thought the cyst would be small and it would go but I realised my stomach was all cyst.

‘I’m glad I don’t look pregnant anymore, but I can’t believe I was walking around like that for so long.’

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