I had horrible hangovers after just 2 drinks — it turns out I had cancer

A young woman started to get hungover after having just two drinks, but it turned out to be a way more severe issue than simply being a lightweight.

In April 2022, when Poppy Beguely was 19 years old, she noticed that her post-going-out hangovers were relentless — with symptoms such as vomiting, developing a sore inside her nose and a facial rash.

At first, she thought it was just the aftermath of going too hard with friends on a night out, but her mindset shifted when the symptoms lingered and she started to cough up blood.

“If I went out drinking, it would take me two drinks to feel a lot more drunk than most people my age and maybe three, four drinks before I would start feeling very ill,” Beguely told NeedToKnow.co.uk.

“Nearly every night I would go out it would end in me vomiting the same night or the morning following,” the florist and swimming instructor added.

Between June and October 2022, Beguely, from Auckland, New Zealand, was hospitalized three times after going out.

She claimed that her doctors thought she potentially had deep vein thrombosis (DVT), a blood clot in a vein located deep within the body, typically in the leg, according to the Cleveland Clinic.

Doctors administered blood thinners and allegedly ignored Beguely’s concerns that there was something more serious going on.

In December 2022, she went to see a doctor with a sore neck and explained all the symptoms she was experiencing — which raised concern for the physician.

A biopsy of a lump on her neck and a PET scan found that Beguely had Stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma and a 6-centimeter tumor in her chest. 

Hodkin’s lymphoma is a cancer of lymph tissue, affecting the lymphatic system, which is part of the body’s germ-fighting immune system, according to the Mayo Clinic.

“It was very bittersweet – I had spent so long worrying about what was wrong with me and having this dread that something might have been seriously wrong, and no one was going to find out what it was,” Beguely admitted to Kennedy News.

“Part of me was happy that I didn’t have to worry about what exactly was wrong anymore. But then, the other part of me was obviously quite upset that I was going to have to go through chemotherapy and lose my hair/eyelashes/eyebrows,” she shared.

Beguely started chemotherapy shortly after her 20th birthday in February 2023.

“I had been a model for a few years, so the thought of that was really hard to get my head around, but at the end of the day you win some and you lose some,” she said.

“The doctors were reassuring that it was unlikely to be fatal as long as I didn’t get any bad infections while doing chemo – they have a high remission rate for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, [so] thankfully I got the lesser of all evils.”

According to the American Cancer Society, the five-year relative survival rate for patients with Hodgkin’s lymphoma is at about 89%.

Her chemotherapy lasted for four months, and she spent one of that time as an in-patient in the hospital due to a severe and rare reaction to a blood transfusion, which gave her “the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my life – in my bones.”

Beguely was on so many painkillers that her stomach and bowels were affected, she said, and her weight ended up dropping to about 77 pounds, leaving her with a feeding tube.

“[This was] the only time I was really scared for my life,” she shared.

While she was a patient, she wasn’t allowed to go outside for weeks because her mom’s immune system was too compromised, but once she did get to go outside, “the sun was on my face, I just started crying, and I couldn’t stop.”

Thankfully, Beguely is now in remission and has returned to work after dealing with her treatment for the majority of the year.

“I think the worst part of having cancer and coming out the other end of it is realizing that while your life got put on hold, the world and everyone around you keeps going,” she shared. “For a while, you feel like you’ve taken so many steps back that it’s hard to get back to normality.”

“Ultimately, it has given me a different outlook on life. I took the smallest things for granted before the smallest things were out of reach,” Beguely added. “I’m grateful that I won my life back, especially after a year of not knowing [what was wrong].”