Erica Lugo was driving to work one October morning last year. Suddenly, she began to sweat profusely and the color drained from her face. When she spotted a parking lot, she immediately decided to pull into it. Suddenly, she couldn’t hear and she started seeing in “tunnel vision”. Recalling her story, Lugo said that she felt three big bumps as she drifted out of consciousness, and, moments later, a man pulled her from her wrecked car.
“I am so thankful for that stranger,” Lugo, 32, told TODAY.
Lugo recalled that at the hospital, the doctors were puzzled as to why a 31-year-old athletic girl would pass out while driving.
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After an MRI, they found a lump deep in the right side of her neck. A month later, a biopsy revealed that Lugo had stage 2 papillary thyroid cancer and she was told she needed to have her thyroid and 33 lymph nodes removed, plus radiation treatment.
She had just signed a lease for a new gym space in Dayton, Ohio, to grow her athletic training business. She was also a single mom. The news left her stunned.
“You think that everything is over,” she said. “No one could prepare you to hear you have stage 2 anything.”
In January of this year, Lugo had her thyroid and lymph node removed. Doctors warned her that most people gain weight afterwards, but Lugo was determined not to let that happen again.
Lugo weighed 322 pounds six years ago. After she began to exercise four days a week, that’s where she began to lose weight.
Now with her thyroid removed, she states that she still wanted to continue. Things, however, were not the same as before. Before, she can do her high intensity interval training all the time. Now, she can do it at least twice, or at max, thrice, a week.
She is one of the newest trainers on USA’s Biggest Loser, and Lugo says that she uses the lessons she learned from her weight loss experience, and cancer experience.
(Image Credit: ericafitlove/ Instagram)
Source: neatorama