Sometimes a case is so “obvious” that the underlying problem stays hidden. A friend of ours went to her OB/GYN because she thought she felt something in one of her breasts. Some mammograms were taken, and that was the last thing she heard about it.
She thought she had imagined the whole thing.
Months went by without worries before she visited her OB/GYN again to remove her IUD. It was then that he noticed that something was really wrong with her breast. He ordered new medical images right away, and wondered whatever happened to the other mammograms.
It turned out that the older images clearly showed a tumor, but due to a mistake made by the IT department, the protocol suggested by the radiologist had never reached the OB/GYN.
It also turned out that this was a fatal mistake.
Our friend (who is a mother of three young children) has recently received her diagnosis, and it is nothing less than a sentence. The cancer has spread beyond the lymph nodes to the bones, and she has a couple of years left at the very most.
Initially, it might have looked as if she was imagining cancer (as some patients really do), but she was not a fake at all — there really was a lump, and her intuition had been right all along.